Author Topic: nFrotz—Endless adventure games on the TI-Nspire!  (Read 27481 times)

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Offline hoffa

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nFrotz—Endless adventure games on the TI-Nspire!
« on: June 28, 2012, 09:26:33 am »


I decided to port the Frotz Z-machine interpreter to the TI-Nspire, and here we are!

Basically it allows you to play various text adventure games, even some best-selling extremely popular game from the old times. Here's a short excerpt from Frotz's how-to-play guide, you'll quickly understand if you've never played text adventures:

Quote
With Interactive Fiction, you type your commands in plain English each
time you see the prompt which looks like this:

>

[...]

There are many differnet kinds of sentences used in interactive fiction.
Here are some examples:

> walk to the north
> west
> ne
> down
> take the birdcage
> read about dimwit flathead
> look up megaboz in the encyclopedia
> lie down in the pink sofa
> examine the shiny coin
> put the rusty key in the cardboard box
> show my bow tie to the bouncer
> hit the crawling crab with the giant nutcracker
> ask the cowardly king about the crown jewels

You can use multiple objects with certain verbs if you separate them by
the word "and" or by a comma. Here are some examples:

> take the book and the frog
> drop the jar of peanut butter, the spoon, and the lemming food
> put the egg and the pencil in the cabinet

(More information here and here.)

Here for example I'm playing the still popular Zork of the 80's:



Or The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy:



This is still an early version of nFrotz, so some games do not work at all. But I've included three games that have at some point been very popular (the two mentioned above and The Lurking Horror), they should work fairly well; have had zero issues myself.

Download the latest nFrotz (attached), copy it on your calculator and launch it. It should ask you to install nFrotz (all it does is it adds a file association rule to your ndless.cfg.tns file), once done you should be able to play any games with a .z extension. You need a recent version of Ndless that supports file associations! (couldn't be arsed to write a file browser, it's more elegant this way)

Here are the download links for the games I talked about that you can try out yourself:

Aaand some on-calc footage:



Oh yes, to save your progress, type "save" and confirm. To restore your progress, type "restore".

Latest source code can be viewed on github.
« Last Edit: June 30, 2012, 09:06:12 am by hoffa »

Offline DJ Omnimaga

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Oh that's nice to hear. I hope it comes to fruition. I'm not a fan of text-based games, but I think a bunch of people here are fans of Zork, as they told me I should play it before.

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Yay Zork :D

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lolol. I remember when some members were looking into porting Zork to the Nspire via Lua. I looked into it, and utterly failed :P

Btw, if that game cover was honest, it should be this:



lolol, it reminded me of this article: http://www.cracked.com/photoplasty_398_if-video-game-covers-were-honest/

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Offline TheNlightenedOne

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I actually had the idea to make a Z-Machine interpreter for the Nspire, that could load .z* files too... I was going to do it after the contest. Looks nice!
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Offline hoffa

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Re: nFrotz 0.1—Endless adventure games on the TI-Nspire!
« Reply #5 on: June 29, 2012, 05:44:17 pm »
Voila, just released a first version of nFrotz.

Offline DJ Omnimaga

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Re: nFrotz 0.1—Endless adventure games on the TI-Nspire!
« Reply #6 on: June 29, 2012, 05:58:50 pm »
Is it possible to switch the text to black background or even change the color of both?

Offline hoffa

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Re: nFrotz 0.1—Endless adventure games on the TI-Nspire!
« Reply #7 on: June 29, 2012, 06:01:53 pm »
Is it possible to switch the text to black background or even change the color of both?
Shit, forgot to implement the invert colors feature. D: (I had white-on-black at first, but I found it's more pleasant to read when it's the other way around.)
nspireio doesn't support colors, but the code isn't that massive so I could very well add true support CX (only shades of gray currently; errors and non-game messages are printed in gray)
« Last Edit: June 29, 2012, 06:02:40 pm by hoffa »

Offline TheNlightenedOne

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Re: nFrotz—Endless adventure games on the TI-Nspire!
« Reply #8 on: July 10, 2012, 12:44:25 pm »
I have 2 questions about nFrotz:
1. There's no CX support, since it uses nspireio, right?
2. Can it load .z3, .z5, or .z8 files?
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Offline ExtendeD

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Re: nFrotz—Endless adventure games on the TI-Nspire!
« Reply #9 on: July 10, 2012, 03:32:16 pm »
For 1.: I don't know for nFrotz, but nspireio does work on CX, but in grayscale. Just make sure to add the following statements at the beginning of your program: "clrscr(); lcd_ingray();"
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Offline mdr1

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Re: nFrotz—Endless adventure games on the TI-Nspire!
« Reply #10 on: October 30, 2012, 05:04:11 pm »
2. Can it load .z3, .z5, or .z8 files?
+1
In fact, I tried to put an adventure created with inform but it doesn't work.



Offline joeym

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Re: nFrotz—Endless adventure games on the TI-Nspire!
« Reply #11 on: May 08, 2013, 01:19:46 am »
I love these text adventure games. Thank you for taking the time to do this.

Do you have know of any other games that can be played aside from the three posted above? What is needed to convert games to be able to be ran on the Nspire?
« Last Edit: May 08, 2013, 01:22:16 am by joeym »

Offline Lionel Debroux

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Re: nFrotz—Endless adventure games on the TI-Nspire!
« Reply #12 on: May 08, 2013, 02:56:25 am »
hoffa has been in a place without Internet connectivity for a while, and I don't remember how long it's supposed to last, so you're unlikely to get a reply from him soon...

BTW, I know of a Joey whose family name starts with M and whose interests include text adventure games... is that you ? ;)
In which case, FWIW, porting the TI-68k/AMS "advint" to the Nspire series would require porting all platform-, OS-specific code to the Nspire's OS / nSDL / some toolkit written on top of nSDL.
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Re: nFrotz—Endless adventure games on the TI-Nspire!
« Reply #13 on: May 08, 2013, 02:57:36 am »
Cool! Robyn Miller(co-creator of Myst) recently said that Zork was actually the only game he played before making Myst. Must be pretty good for non-gamers then? (Since that is what Myst is, according to him). :)



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Offline joeym

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Re: nFrotz—Endless adventure games on the TI-Nspire!
« Reply #14 on: May 08, 2013, 12:20:54 pm »
Hi Lionel,

Yeah this is me :) I forgot to mention that I recently got a TI-nSpire. So I have been looking into what can be done with it.

I was very happy to see this ported to the nSpire.