so the frobtads version @ tads.org is out of date and won’t run on apple silicon.
there doesn’t appear to be a homebrew of frobtads available anymore.
i downloaded the source to compile myself. i installed cmake and ncurses without a problem per the installation instructions. but when i go to make the file (again, exactly following the instructions) i get a ‘fatal error - missing file “memory”’ error.
so is TADS a serious thing that people can actually install and use? or is it just a windows only thing and i’m out of luck?
If you think it’s an actual bug you should try creating an issue on the project’s github repo. You’ll want to include the actual command line(s) you’re using and cut and paste the error message(s).
@RealNC also posts here so it’s possible they’ll be along in a bit to respond directly.
That said, I don’t have a mac but if you want to cut and paste the actual error messages I’d be willing to take a shot at troubleshooting. I’ve never compiled FrobTADS on a mac, but I did just recently build it for both linux and OpenBSD, so I can verify it’s not windows-only.
Yeah, I think this is a standard mac-ism; I think they moved all the headers out of /usr/include some revs ago. Which would mean this is a simple fix (e.g. setting an environment variable to indicate the path to the standard library headers).
I’m trying to see if I can get access to a Mac I can compile on.
Edit: In the process of setting up a VirtualBox instance, looks like it’ll take a couple hours.
In this Linux box frobTads compiles & run fine, and IS the reference console 'terp (that is, the one used to check that there’s few, if any, non-programmed [press a key] under a fixed-width 80x25 screen)
so, under MacOs should compile fine, albeit I find really hard visualizing a mac with a console shell…
when draconis mentioned C++ library files it rang a faint bell. so, just to try something, i reinstalled x-code, thinking maybe i was missing some c++ file headers.
cmake will now run but now I get an entirely different error message:
make: Makefile: No such file or directory
make: *** No rule to make target `Makefile'. Stop.
success. after reinstalling xcode and cmake, it finally ran OK and seems to be working.
thx for your help and hope you didn’t spend too much time trying to get macos running virtually. i didn’t think that was even possible to get arm-macos running virtually!?
oh well, after finally getting everything installed now i get compiler errors.
error: module "=.t" has the same name as an existing module
error: module ";.t" has the same name as an existing module
i was curious about TADS due to its multimedia capabilities but it appears it’s not for me. it very clearly doesn’t “just work” and, on the mac side anyway, doesn’t appear to be actively maintained (the website points to defunct installs that are long out of date, the macos install is glitchy, and now there’s something squirrelly somewhere in the compiler that i don’t have the energy, expertise, or interest in investigating).
i’ll stick with inform6/punyinform/glulx - despite their age (in the case of i6/glulx) i’ve never had trouble compiling/installing any of these and they’re rock solid “out of the box”.
TADS is stable but not under active development. The website hasn’t been updated in a long while. But if you’re interested in TADS’ multimedia capabilities then I don’t think FrobTADS is a good interpreter anyway as it’s (mostly?) text only.
Same here and I used Homebrew to install it. It works great with VS Code, too.
I did have some issues getting it to work at first. There are some helpful threads sprinkled about in this category. Check this one: FrobTADS with Homebrew
charlesmoore@Charless-MacBook-Pro ~ % brew install frobtads
==> Downloading https://formulae.brew.sh/api/formula.jws.json
################################################################################################################# 100.0%
==> Downloading https://formulae.brew.sh/api/cask.jws.json
################################################################################################################# 100.0%
Warning: No available formula with the name "frobtads". Did you mean frotz?
==> Searching for similarly named formulae and casks...
==> Formulae
frotz ✔
and, yes, i tried downloading from the website but i get a “bad CPU version” (paraphrasing), i’m assuming because it’s the old intel version.
I wonder if I could just send you the files I have. My ARM Mac is almost brand new and running Sequoia. TADS is building just fine in VSCode but I always launch QTads to test run it. I’d hate to see you miss out! TADS is really great!
Well that’s what I meant… I could just pass you along the compiler binary that’s sitting in my /usr/local/bin. It works on mine, so maybe it’d work on yours…