.z6-Compatible Interpreters for macOS

Technical Development Interpreters
1

Are there any Z-code interpreters for macOS 13.4.x that can fully run .z6 games (graphics included)?

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2

I’ve never used macOS, but if you can build SDL Frotz from source, it handles z6 features perfectly.

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3

Playing with graphics isn’t too tough. Let us know if you run into trouble and I’ll walk you through it.

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In all honesty, if there was a way to port Frotz or a similar v6-compatible interpreter (I think Frotz is the only one?) to an online area, it could be accessible by all.

I have no idea how hard this is, so I assume it’s very, very hard.

5

Thanks for the replies. I guess this was to be expected for Macs, but still a bit disappointing. To be more specific: I’m looking for a “download and run” macOS desktop GUI interpreter for .z6 games. I’d rather not have to learn git and Xcode, but I appreciate the suggestion :slight_smile: .

Back in the day, Zoom covered things perfectly, but it was last updated in 2017 and doesn’t run on current systems. I can run Frotz from the command line, but the Homebrew version doesn’t support graphics.

At this point, it looks like firing up UAE to run the Amiga versions of those titles is the easiest approach :laughing: .

6

Does Lectrote run z6? I use that on Mac

7

Regrettably no.

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If you have Homebrew installed, it is straightforward to compile SDL Frotz from source and get full graphics support, as @Nathan mentioned above.

There is also an updated Zoom on Github, used by the Mac Inform IDE, but it has some pretty serious bugs when it comes to running Z6 games. Zork 0 works reasonably well, though.

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Ah, didn’t know about the Zoom fork – thanks, Angstsmurf! You’re right, though, it is fairly buggy at the moment.

There only seems to be one formula for Frotz via Homebrew. What do I do to add SDL graphics support to it?

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10

You basically just download the source code from the Gitlab page, navigate to its directory in Terminal and type make sdl and then make install_sdl. Then you can run SDL Frotz with the command sfrotz.

However, you will need to install all dependencies first, which is done with

brew install sdl2 sdl2-mixer freetype libpng jpeg zlib

The full instructions are at https://gitlab.com/DavidGriffith/frotz/-/blob/master/INSTALL

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Thanks again! Given no experience with make whatsoever, it went smoothly (turns out I already had all the dependencies installed). At least I didn’t have to use git :slight_smile: . I can finally play Journey now, so yay!

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