Does anyone have very old backups or mirrors of the IF Archive from circa 1994 to 1998? I’m trying to locate some lost source code, in particular very old versions of Frotz.
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I have some frotz interpreter for Android that doesn’t work properly anymore.
I don’t have a wholesale backup, but I do have a bunch of files downloaded at the time, which occasionally turn out not to have survived elsewhere.
For frotz, I’ve located stuff lying around (sometimes derivative things like RPMs) for versions including:
- 2.32
- 2.32r2
- 2.40beta2
- 2.40beta5
- 2.40
These sorts of versions look well-represented on today’s IF Archive, but I mention them in case there might be something of interest.
You need the old ftp://ftp.gmd.de/if-archive. I couldn’t find anything useful with Google.
I was going to suggest trying the Wayback Machine on the Internet Archive, but that doesn’t go back far enough. Perhaps you could find a url for one of the old mirrors that used a web interface. Even then, it may be a bit iffy, as linked files are often not archived. I found links to two mirrors, but the frotz pages hadn’t been archived.
I have Frotz V1.01 from December 1995 (source code and DOS).
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I’d very much like to have that.
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Absolutely, I was hesitant to insert the files as an attachment, but now I realised I can just add links:
Frotz V1.01 source code
Frotz V1.01 DOS build
I might delete the files again in a month or so, so get them while they’re fresh, everyone!
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By all means upload them at Index: if-archive/infocom/interpreters/frotz/old , for historic preservation purposes.
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Oh, good idea, done.
I thought the old versions were gone from the archive due to some policy.
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The policy used to be “disk space is expensive, so we should throw away old versions.” A few years ago we noticed the flaw in that logic and revised the policy. :)
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Thanks! This will help me understand more of why some stuff was done the way it was in Frotz.
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After going through the source code, it seems clear that Stefan Jokisch had Frotz from the beginning reading in the entire Z-code file into memory. I was hoping to find a remnant of the disk-paging code, but it looks like I’ll have to remake that from scratch.
You might need to delve a little further back in history.
I wrote a z-code interpreter for the Atari ST many, many years ago. This was based on the C source code written by InfoTaskForce (a bunch of students at Sydney University). I’m fairly sure that this supported paging, as paging was used on the Atari ST.
You can find various versions of the InfoTaskForce source code for various platforms at the IF Archive.
It turns out that the IF Archive has a version of Zip that uses disk-paging.
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