Message-Id: <announce.4ADE639C.10603@cwilson.fastmail.fm>
Date: Tue, 20 Oct 2009 21:27:56 -0400
From: Charles Wilson <cygwin AT cwilson DOT fastmail DOT fm>
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Subject: [ANNOUNCEMENT] [1.7] ITP: nfrotz
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And now for something completely different:

NFrotz is a z Z-Machine interpretor (virtual machine) for text mode
interactive games. It is an ncurses-based synthesis of the Windows
version of frotz (WinFrotz) with the Unix one, adding support for the
Quetzal savefile format, Blorb and iFiction support, and Unicode output
on terminals that support it. It supports zcode specification 1.1,
including all versions v1 thru v8 (except for some v6 [graphical] games).

This release includes a bundled version of the great grand-daddy of them
all, "Colossal Cave Adventure" (aka Adventure). The original, written in
Fortran in 1975 by Will Crowther, was expanded by Don Woods in 1977 to a
350 point version, which was the most widely-distributed variant. This
was then ported DOS MS Fortran, which was itself re-implemented using
the TADS virtual machine interpreter. Finally, the TADS version was
ported to zcode -- and now you have it!

The more-or-less public domain version of the original MIT Zork (aka
"Dungeon") is installed as zdungeon. This was the original mainframe
version, which was later modified and divided into the Zork Trilogy. It
was ported to zcode from the 1981-era PDP-10 MDL source by Ethan Dicks:
  http://www.penguincentral.com/retrocomputing/zdungeon/
Note that there ARE gameplay differences between Dungeon and similar
situations/locations in the Zork Trilogy.

There is also a script `/usr/bin/zork-config' which can be used to
download and install the Zork I, Zork II, Zork III, and Zork: The
Undiscovered Undergound games.  These four games were released gratis,
but not libre, by Infocom/Activision as part of the promotional campaign
for Zork: Nemesis and Zork Grand Inquisitor.  However, the license for
these games prohibits redistribution, so they are not directly bundled
here. Instead, use the script to download directly from the (unofficial,
now that Infocom is dead) Infocom homepage.


nfrotz is included in Mandriva 2009.1:
http://www.rpmfind.net/linux/RPM/mandriva/2009.1/i586/media/contrib/release/nfrotz-0.3.3-1mdv2009.0.i586.html
(Debian and Fedora ship plain unix 'frotz', which does not contain the
winFrotz extensions nor the unicode [*] support).

[*] unicode support is more a promise than a reality, in this cygwin
release.  It needs libncursesw.

http://cygutils.fruitbat.org/ITP-nfrotz/nfrotz-0.3.3-1-src.tar.bz2
http://cygutils.fruitbat.org/ITP-nfrotz/nfrotz-0.3.3-1.tar.bz2
http://cygutils.fruitbat.org/ITP-nfrotz/setup.hint


====== nfrotz setup.hint =====
category: Games
requires: libncurses9 diffutils
sdesc: "A Z-Machine interpretor for text-mode interactive games"
ldesc: "NFrotz is a z Z-Machine interpretor (virtual machine) for
text mode interactive games.  It is an ncurses-based synthesis of
the Windows version of frotz (WinFrotz) with the Unix one, adding
support for the Quetzal savefile format, Blorb and iFiction support,
and Unicode output on terminals that support it.  It supports zcode
specification 1.1 including all versions v1 thru v8 (limited
graphics support for v6)."

OK?

--
Chuck


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