From what I’ve discovered so far, the WinFrotz TTS only works with an out-dated version of WinFrotz.
Newer versions of WinFrotz supposedly already have text to speech as an OPTION in the menu. but I can’t download this newer version, because my anti-virus flags the file as dangerous for some reason and deletes it.
And it sounds like you are saying the WinFrotz included in Gargoyle won’t have speech.
I believe you, but I can’t even get it to run. Do you know how to run it?
What does this mean?
Syntax: frotz [options] story-file
Are you saying the Frotz.exe from within Gargoyle doesn’t run independently at all?
My anti-virus will always delete anything to do with WinFrotz, it doesn’t even like the archive website where the file is stored, and insists that it is dangerous.
Everyone does agree that it is a false positive, but I’m not sure what else to do.
Right now I am able to copy and paste text from Gargoyle into Notepad and have Windows Narrator read it out-loud.
That isn’t the best solution, but it might be my only option left.
Is the antivirus problem with WinFrotz specifically with the website it’s hosted on, or with the file too? Because if the problem is the site rather than the file, maybe someone could get the file, zip it up, and post it here?
I’m not sure where the most recent version of WinFrotz is… I see that at least one version is hosted at SourceForge which does indeed have the reputation of packaging malware with its downloads, although the newest management promised to clean up their act.
You can download a trial version of JAWS (Job Access With Speech), which will work for 40 minutes per session, from Freedom Scientific. It works with numerous interpreters.
I have been doing lots of research, and there appears to be very strong evidence that WinFrotzTTS has been confused with another program with a similar name which is in fact malware.
The suggestion of this has come up repeatedly with various websites and links.
Not saying it is a virus, but there is probably enough of a red flag on it to make people concerned.
Oh, there are plenty. Frotz, Rezrov, Nitfol, Filfre, Gnusto, Bocfel, Parchment, Quixe, Glulxe, Git, Incant, Zoom, Spatterlight…I’d suggest a command-line one, like Bocfel, might be best for TTS compatibility.
Bocfel source code is available as some sort of 100 KB tar.gz file, but that is useless.
It appears the only way of running Bocfel is within Gargoyle, but I suppose its still some
sort of bitmap graphical text so this isn’t a fix, unfortunately.
Unless you know of another way to use the source code to actually run itself.
Yes - tons and tons! Older versions of the Inform programming language compiled to Z-code, so for many years, it was the biggest format for distributing games. (The latest version of Inform can still compile to Z-code, but it quickly runs out of space, so most Inform games now are released in Glulx format instead. But there are still hundreds of excellent Z-Machine games out there.)