Running frotz on OSX El Capitan 10.11.3

Playing Getting Started Playing IF
1

Hello! I love Frotz and IF. I’ve played a lot before on other computers. But now I’m trying to install on a Mac, and I’m having a lot of problems. I hope someone can help.

At ifarchive.org, I downloaded frotz-2.41-MacOSX.dmg.sit by Mike Johnson. I downloaded the latest version of Stuffit Expander to unpack it. At first I was getting an error that said “Legacy image should be converted.” I managed to fix this by going into Disk Utility, and converting it.

Finally I opened “frotz for Mac OS X (1.5)”. Inside was a beautiful graphic from Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, some entertaining “Read Me First” text, a folder full of frotz documentation, and an icon that said, “Install frotz.mpkg”.

And here I am stuck. Because every time I double-click on that “Install frotz.mpkg” icon, it starts to take me through the installation process, and then when I click “install” it says “The installation failed. The Installer could not install the software. The Installer could not install the software because there was no software to install.”

I know that once frotz is installed, I will have to use the Terminal to write the command “frotz” and then the file path… I have no problem with that. But the installation itself doesn’t seem to work and I’ve run out of ideas.

Thanks for reading this, and hoping someone can help,
Ian

2

That package was built in 2002; it will certainly be a binary for PPC Macintoshes. It will not run on any Mac made in the past ten years.

You can compile command-line Frotz from source, if you have the Mac dev tools installed. I believe you can also get it from package managers like Homebrew.

3

To expand on the latter part of what Zarf sez…

[code]brew install homebrew/games/frotz

==> Tapping homebrew/games
Cloning into ‘/usr/local/Homebrew/Library/Taps/homebrew/homebrew-games’…
remote: Counting objects: 180, done.
remote: Compressing objects: 100% (176/176), done.
remote: Total 180 (delta 4), reused 42 (delta 3), pack-reused 0
Receiving objects: 100% (180/180), 137.45 KiB | 0 bytes/s, done.
Resolving deltas: 100% (4/4), done.
Tapped 174 formulae (202 files, 437.8K)
==> Installing frotz from homebrew/games
==> Downloading https://github.com/DavidGriffith/frotz/archive/2.44.tar.gz
==> Downloading from https://codeload.github.com/DavidGriffith/frotz/tar.gz/2.44
######################################################################## 100.0%
==> make frotz
==> make install
/usr/local/Cellar/frotz/2.44: 9 files, 132.4K, built in 4 seconds

[/code]

and then…

frotz FROTZ V2.44 curses interface.

I then loaded the Zork II .z5 file as a test and it works fine in my terminal. I’m currently on OSX version 10.12.2

4

Remotely related to your solution:
I have both a PC and a Sierra Mac. On my PC, when I play Zork Zero, I
prefer using Windows Frotz because Frotz allows me to undo multiple
moves. On my Mac, I play Zork Zero the old way, without Frotz, in Boxer,
where I can only undo one move, but the graphics are fine. But only a
DOS version of Frotz works in Boxer, and Zork Zero graphics don’t work
with any DOS version of Frotz. Maybe you techies know something I don’t?
Is there absolutely no way to get the Zork Zero graphics to work with
Frotz in Boxer?