Possible to compiler Inform 5 game source code?
Operating system?
The source for various Inform 5 compilers and libraries is available on the Archive; you may need to build the compiler from source, but that shouldn’t be too hard if you have a C compiler.
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I did a quick check whether the Inform 6 compiler can still compile Inform 5 code. Turns out no – the I5 parser.h has a routine called Copy(), and copy is reserved as a property name in I6.
If you renamed the routine to CopyBuffer(), you might make it work, but I didn’t test that far.
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I kept running into roadblocks. It was just an exercise for some old source I wanted to experiment with.
I6 is good. 
Thank you.
Hello,
I’ve used this version from ifarchive to compile three or four V3 games recently from a Powershell terminal on Windows 11.
I have a folder like this (with the i5 files from ifarchive):
- inform5
- i5lib
- grammar.h
- parser.h
- verblib.h
- INFORM.EXE
Then I run this to compile “story.inf” to story.z3:
C:\USERS\KV\BIN\INFORM5\INFORM.EXE -v3 +C:\USERS\KV\BIN\INFORM5\I5LIB story
I needed to dive into the old manual for that version to figure out a few things which were slightly different from i6, but it’s not too bad, really. (It is pickier about spacing and such.)
EDIT: I’m sure you didn’t need me to explain 99% of that if you already use i6, but that 1% you needed should be in there somewhere, ha-ha.
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KV,
I didn’t think to use the NT version on Windows.
That works on my Win 11 computer. Nice!
Still haven’t been able to compile the Inform 5 compiler source code on my RPi 5 but the Win 11 is good.
Thank you!
PS. Thanks all for the help. I managed to compile Zarf’s Lists game. Wahoo!
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To compile the Inform 5 compiler, it should suffice to grab the files from Index: if-archive/infocom/compilers/inform5/source ; replace #define GRAHAM in header.h with #define UNIX; then do
cc -w --std c89 -o inform5 *.c
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That worked! Thank you very much!!!