After years of trying, I have finally managed to compile TADS (frobtads) on the Raspberry Pi 5, along with the Adv3Lite library!
I followed the README and INSTALL directions implicitly. I especially installed every ncurses and libcurl files/apps available with the latest release - Debian Bookworm - Kernel version 6.6 with updates through today. (March 18, 2025)
It has been a long time coming. I have tried this very procedure numerous times without prior success.
At this point, with the speed of the RPi and its capabilities, I can forgoe MS Win 11 and even MacOS!
Games would not compile with Adv3Lite. The error indicated that the file: adv3lite.tl would not open. I thought it was a permissions issue and tried working with directories and file permissions to no avail.
The solution turned out to be: the adv3lite.tl file was named adv3Lite.tl. I changed the name and Adv3lite is now compiling as expected.
Whew!
PS. I am not sure that it was the proper solution, but it works?
I’m a little puzzled by this, in that the spelling adv3Lite is consistently used throughout the documentation (so far as I can see) and, as you found, in the adv3Lite.tl file itself. I’d have thought the proper solution would have been to use the spelling adv3Lite in your makefile. Was this the change you made, or did you try it and find that it didn’t work? I’m not that familiar with the Raspberry Pi so I don’t know if it has a particular problem with upper case letters in file names that would have prevented this fix.
If you changed the name of the adv3Lite.th file to adv3lite.tl and that works for you, that’s fine, but you would, of course, have to make the same change every time you downloaded a new version of adv3Lite.
Is this an issue that anyone else has come across?
Sir. You are correct. There is a capital L in the documentation!
I have always used the Windows version of TADS. The make file was never an issue. I also recently set up TADS from source on an Apple Mac Mini M4. The capital L was not an issue. I guess Mac OS is not as finnicky with capitalization in this case. I even copied working game files over from the Mac. The Raspberry Pi strictly enforces capitalization with its files.
All of this became an issue with my deteriorating vision. I have been searching for a “simpler” computer than Windows to work with a braille display. The Mac was better, but the Raspberry Pi is much better. The RPi will boot into a command line terminal rather than graphic interface. Even with a LOT of magnification, I missed the “L”.
My RPi 5 general purpose development computer: 64 bit quad core ARM processor, 8 gb ram and 254 gb SSD. All for ~$125. It was designed as an educational platform that has evolved into a very capable desktop.
