Frolg 1.4 - Z-machine assembler for versions 1 to 10

Technical Development Interpreters
1

This is a Z-machine macro assembler for all versions of Z-machine from 1 to 10. Unfortunately there is not currently any documentation. This file is written in C and is licensed under GNU GPL version 3 or later version.

Download: http://zzo38computer.org/zmachine/frolg.zip

(I called it “Frolg” after a Zork spell; the names like “Frotz” and “Gnusto” are already taken so I didn’t use those. The compiler (still in progress) is called “Berzio”.)

Please write any question/suggestion/comment/complaints if you have.

2

Why have you made version 9, and what interpreters will support it?

3

None yet but if I write one it will support. Only minor changes should be necessary to support version 9 in existing interpreters, though. It extends some things to be less limitation while retaining simplicity and 16-bits of Z-machine.

4

mailman-new.greennet.org.uk/pipe … 01053.html

There were already plans for a version 9, so you should probably call yours version 10.

But realistically, unless you have authors, compiler writers, and interpreter writers on board, this won’t go anywhere. And now that we have Glulx, I can’t conceive how you would get them on board.

5

Now Frolg version 0.6 is available; it makes many bug fixes and other improvements.

6

Frolg 0.7 is released. Here is a list of some of the changes:

  • The ! command is fixed (it previously always wrote zero for the high byte).
  • The text packing algorithm is improved.
  • Now the standard library writes “Fr” and the version number into the “compiler info” header.
  • CALL and ICALL are now macros (because of their difference in version 9).
  • Support for “dynamic fwords” is added.

Please tell me if you find any other bugs or have any other idea for improvement, or if you use this for anything.

7

Version 1.1 is now released which adds a lot of improvement and bug fix, including (but not limited to):

  • Unused things in the standard library are removed.
  • A bug with deciding which instructions are branch has been fixed (one thing that didn’t work before was the EQUAL? instruction).
  • Input encoding can be ASCII/ZSCII (the default), CP437/CP850, Windows-1252/ISO-8859-1, or UTF-8. (These four should be sufficient; I don’t intend to add more.)
  • COMPLIANT mode, which disables the text packing algorithm and allows Unicode translation tables to be used.
  • Command-line parameters to set macros and other things.
  • A few missing instructions have been added.
  • More commands for dealing with macros.
8

Version 1.4 is now released (I didn’t mention the others), and this also makes a lot of improvements and bug fix.