Frotz is a very portable program and as such has been ported to quite a
lot of different platforms.
These are actively-maintained ports and their webpages (if known):
------------------------------------
WinFrotz
Frotz for machines running Microsoft Windows.
http://www.d.kinder.btinternet.co.uk
AmigaFrotz
Frotz for the Amiga series of computers.
(no webpage)
FrotzCE
Frotz for PocketPC machines running WindowsCE.
http://www.pyram-id.demon.co.uk/FrotzCE.html
(Based on 2.32)
DOS
Good ol' DOS
(no webpage)
Kwest
Frotz ported to KDE.
http://users.pandora.be/peter.bienstman/kwest/
EbmFrotz
Frotz ported to Franklin's eBookman.
http://www.twpo.com.au/cwarrens/ebm
Nobody maintains these ports:
-----------------------------
Pilot Frotz
Frotz for Palm Pilot machines.
http://www.geocities.com/SiliconValley/Way/2367/
(Link has been dead for several months)
Frotz might work well with these platforms:
-------------------------------------------
Apple IIgs.
I'm fairly sure that with its greater memory capacity than the ealier
members of the Apple II family, at least text-mode Frotz should be
doable. Perhaps even graphics and sound could be done.
RISC/OS
I don't see why not.
Texas Instruments TI-92 and TI-92+ graphing calculators:
With a Motorola 680000 of some sort and loads of nifty development
software, it should be a worthwhile effort. Look at
http://www.ticalc.org or all sorts of interesting things that have been
done with this calculator.
CP/M:
Usually we'll have a 64 kilobyte limit to memory. Fortunately there is
a solution in the form of an interpreter written in Z80 assembly called
ZXZVM available at the IF Archive. It seems specific to the Spectrum
+3, PCW16, and PCW10 CP/M machines. I'd be most pleased if someone with
one of those new IMSAI Series 2 machines is able to get ZXZVM working on
that machine. However, at http://www.imsai.net, the new machine is
described as having 1 meg of static system memory. Given all this,
Frotz might be doable on some more beefy CP/M machines.
Frotz probably won't work on these platforms:
---------------------------------------------
Apple II:
The IIe and IIc with expanded memory (at least 143k) might be enough for
running up to V5, but I'm not sure if Frotz will appreciate working in
such a small space. Yes, I know that several Solid Gold editions were
released for Apple II.
Commodore 64:
Memory is limited to a bit less than 64 kilobytes. In the heyday of
Infocom, the C64 could barely support V4 games.
Commodore 128:
Probably same troubles as with Apple II.
Atari 8-bit:
Probably troubles as with the Commodore 64.
Wireless phones:
They might have enough memory to handle Frotz, but I have severe doubts
about how usable any sort of Interactive Fiction can be on such a
device. Phones were not designed to be used as general-purpose
terminals.
Digital cameras:
Someone ported the venerable arcade machine emulator MAME to a Kodak
digital camera some time ago. There should be enough space and
processing power to run Frotz, but as with wireless phones, IF is
impractical on such a platform.
I asked Brian Moriarty, author of several works of Interactive Fiction
for Infocom about the feasability of porting Frotz to machines using the
MOS 6502 (Apple II, Atari 8-bit, Commodore 64 and 128). Here is his
response to my emailed question:
Date: Thu, 8 Aug 2002 18:54:51 -0400
From: Brian Moriarty <prof@ludix.com>
To: Dave <dgriffi@cs.csubak.edu>
Subject: RE: porting Frotz to 6502 machines
The original 6502 ZIPs were hand-written in assembler, and
the resulting binaries were usually quite small (around 8k).
Of course, a C compiler wouldn't be quite as efficient.
The larger problem is that many of the later Z features (beyond
version 2) simply won't work on an Atari, C64 or Apple II,
either due to RAM, display or disk drive restrictions. When moving
into versions 3 and beyond, we decided to leave that class of
machine behind.
-----Original Message-----
From: Dave [mailto:dgriffi@cs.csubak.edu]
Sent: Thursday, August 08, 2002 6:43 PM
To: prof@ludix.com
Subject: porting Frotz to 6502 machines
Brian Moriarty,
I was wondering if I could pick your brain a bit on Z-machine portability.
One of the ongoing goals for the Frotz project is extreme portability,
including to all sorts of old architectures. I've been pondering porting
Frotz to 6502 machines such as the C64, Apple II, and Atari 8-bit
computers. Doing some investigation with the CC65 6502 C compiler brought
me to the conclusion that Frotz would produce a binary too large to fit in
the memory of these machines. Apple IIgs might work. Given your work on
making Z-machine interpreters for these machines (albeit in assembly, I
assume) would this be an accurate assumption?
Also, given what I've found out about the new upcoming IMSAI Series 2
machine, this might be capable of handling Frotz.