I make no claims as to the appropriateness of the fix, nor the legitimacy of the problem, but here is what I ran into today and also how I fixed it.
When playing IF in a CLI environment (such as over an ssh connection) in linux, I didn’t find a lot of options that could handle zblorb files and let me set error reporting on Vile Zero Errors From Hell. Downloading and compiling the latest frotz did not allow me to play zblorb files. nfrotz (as compiled from ifarchive.org/if-archive/infocom … -0.3.3.tgz) plays zblorb files, but does not respect the error reporting option as specified in the man page (e.g. -Z 0) passed as an option from the command line or as configuration file. I tried both.
However, and I know this is probably horrible and wrong, and I’m willing to accept any advice on a better way of addressing the problem (or finding advice on a better text only terp for *nix), I fixed it by editing nfrotz-0.3.3/src/core/err.c and changing:
int err_report_mode = ERR_DEFAULT_REPORT_MODE;
to
int err_report_mode = 0;
then recompiling. After that, no more Vile Zero Errors From Hell. I just wanted to share in case anybody else runs into the same problem.