Frotz on TOPS-20

I now have a working port of dumb-frotz 2.32r1 to TOPS-20 on the PDP-10.

The sources that will work with KCC on TOPS-20 (included as part of the
pandas TOPS-20 distribution) are in the “master” branch of:

The modified sources (to make Frotz 36-bit clean) are in the “unix”
branch.

Alternatively, you can get the “gnusto-frotz-tops20” sources from
https://github.com/athornton/gnusto-frotz-tops20; as long as you have a
Perl 5 interpreter, sed, and git, it will check out the “unix” branch
above and transmogrify the sources into a form that TOPS-20 is happy
with.

Once you have those, get them onto your PDP-10 (for example, with FTP in
text mode), and then just:

cc -o frotz *.c

Then you can (from that directory):

frotz zcode-game.z3

(or z5, or z8; most of the actual Infocom games newly available at
https://github.com/historicalsource have the .zip extension)

My future plan is to add support for a VT-100 (or successor) terminal to
Frotz, which would give us an interface equivalent to any of the
(non-graphical) Infocom micro interpreters, and maybe to port a more
modern version of Frotz, although that will take de-C99ing it and
making it build without make.

I am also planning on getting it running on the TOPS-20 machine at the Living Computer Museum and Labs, if they will hurry up and approve my account.

Adam

2 Likes