=========================================================================== --------------------------------------------------------------------------- | READ THIS FILE ALL THE WAY THROUGH BEFORE ATTEMPTING TO INSTALL FROTZ | --------------------------------------------------------------------------- =========================================================================== Frotz was originally written specifically for MS/PC DOS. When it began to be ported to other machines and operating systems, the DOS port lagged behind. Now it is more or less on par with Unix Frotz with the conspicuous exception that Blorb is not entirely supported. Blorb is supported only as far as extracting a zcode file, but not for getting audio and graphic data. For now, only the old Infocom-style mechanism for these are supported. Sound is supported through Soundblaster compatible sound cards. Graphic levels from Hercules to MCGA are supported. To compile DOS Frotz, you need the following: * Borland Turbo C++ 3.00. This is the latest version I'm aware of capable of building 16-bit DOS applications. * PC-DOS, MS-DOS, or DR-DOS version 5.0 or higher. FreeDOS 1.2 works well too. ============== Compilation || ============== Turbo C++ is typically installed to C:\tc. Make sure your path contains C:\tc\bin. When this is done, type "make". Did Borland's make program run? Now type "tcc". If those two commands work, then you should be ready to compile. To compile, you need to first get the source code into a DOS machine, whether it's real or emulated. Do "make dos" to produce a zip file, frotzsrc.zip, which can then be copied to your real or virtual DOS machine. To compile, open up this zip file and go into the frotzsrc directory and type "build". That will invoke "build.bat", a batch file that simply executes "make -f makefile.tc". The reason for this is a bit of syntactic sugar to deal with the fact that it is impractical to have one Makefile build both Unix and DOS versions. After about a minute, you should have FROTZ.EXE. This file is all you need to run Frotz. Put it somewhere in your path and go to wherever you keep your Infocom games. Type "frotz zork1.dat" or whatever and there you go. Compile-time options are set in src/dos/defs.h. There should be no need to edit Makefile.tc. Having compile-time options like this allows for the Turbo C IDE to be used. At the moment, the settings in frotz.prj do not result in an optimized executable. I'm not sure how to get that file in agreement with what's in Makefile.tc. To clean up after a build, type "build clean". ======================== Hardware Requirements || ======================== The exact hardware requirements of DOS Frotz are yet to be determined. Please send me reports of what Zcode works and what doesn't.