so this isn’t my first time playing IF but its the first time im having this issue. im using frotz trying to save my game when i name the file and press enter i get a message that says failed. no other error or anything is displayed and my game is not saved. any idea what the issue is??
If frotz isn’t the best thing to use what interpreter do you guys recomend? im using debian. ive looked at gargoyle and thinking of trying that out.
Hmm, could you tell us what version of Frotz you are using and what version of Debian? (And just to confirm, if you try >version on your game of Zork, could you paste what it says?)
Also make sure you’re saving somewhere inside your home dir, not in some other stray directory where you might not have write access.
I’m a Linux user on a Debian derivative. Gargoyle is great, and it might just be trying that is the easiest way to just get playing without worrying about it, especially if you’re not that used to working in the terminal.
There are a lot of reasons why you might have trouble saving, and most of them aren’t problems with Frotz itself. Check to see what the actual directory is that you’re trying to save into: is it write-protected? (Maybe this is the working directory, i.e. the directory that you were currently in when you invoked the frotz command. Try specifying a full path, from the filesystem root, if you’re not sure.) Check,too, to make sure that you’re not using any unusual characters in the filename that you’re trying to save to.
But if you just want to get playing and not muck about with filesystem permissions and full pathways, it might be that just trying another interpreter is the quickest way to do so. Gargoyle is pretty good.
Another Debian user here. As others have said, the most likely cause is trying to save somewhere you can’t write to for whatever reason: permissions, out of space, read-only media, etc.
i see frotz is defaulted to install to /usr/local so you guys are correct. i just wanted to make sure it wasn’t some frotz bug.