Frotz is a very portable program and as such has been ported to quite a lot of different platforms. These are actively-maintained ports and their webpages (if known): ------------------------------------ WinFrotz Frotz for machines running Microsoft Windows. http://www.d.kinder.btinternet.co.uk AmigaFrotz Frotz for the Amiga series of computers. (no webpage) FrotzCE Frotz for PocketPC machines running WindowsCE. http://www.pyram-id.demon.co.uk/FrotzCE.html (Based on 2.32) DOS Good ol' DOS (no webpage) Kwest Frotz ported to KDE. http://users.pandora.be/peter.bienstman/kwest/ EbmFrotz Frotz ported to Franklin's eBookman. http://www.twpo.com.au/cwarrens/ebm Nobody maintains these ports: ----------------------------- Pilot Frotz Frotz for Palm Pilot machines. http://www.geocities.com/SiliconValley/Way/2367/ (Link has been dead for several months) Frotz might work well with these platforms: ------------------------------------------- Apple IIgs. I'm fairly sure that with its greater memory capacity than the ealier members of the Apple II family, at least text-mode Frotz should be doable. Perhaps even graphics and sound could be done. RISC/OS I don't see why not. Texas Instruments TI-92 and TI-92+ graphing calculators: With a Motorola 680000 of some sort and loads of nifty development software, it should be a worthwhile effort. Look at http://www.ticalc.org or all sorts of interesting things that have been done with this calculator. CP/M: Usually we'll have a 64 kilobyte limit to memory. Fortunately there is a solution in the form of an interpreter written in Z80 assembly called ZXZVM available at the IF Archive. It seems specific to the Spectrum +3, PCW16, and PCW10 CP/M machines. I'd be most pleased if someone with one of those new IMSAI Series 2 machines is able to get ZXZVM working on that machine. However, at http://www.imsai.net, the new machine is described as having 1 meg of static system memory. Given all this, Frotz might be doable on some more beefy CP/M machines. Frotz probably won't work on these platforms: --------------------------------------------- Apple II: The IIe and IIc with expanded memory (at least 143k) might be enough for running up to V5, but I'm not sure if Frotz will appreciate working in such a small space. Yes, I know that several Solid Gold editions were released for Apple II. Commodore 64: Memory is limited to a bit less than 64 kilobytes. In the heyday of Infocom, the C64 could barely support V4 games. Commodore 128: Probably same troubles as with Apple II. Atari 8-bit: Probably troubles as with the Commodore 64. Wireless phones: They might have enough memory to handle Frotz, but I have severe doubts about how usable any sort of Interactive Fiction can be on such a device. Phones were not designed to be used as general-purpose terminals. Digital cameras: Someone ported the venerable arcade machine emulator MAME to a Kodak digital camera some time ago. There should be enough space and processing power to run Frotz, but as with wireless phones, IF is impractical on such a platform. I asked Brian Moriarty, author of several works of Interactive Fiction for Infocom about the feasability of porting Frotz to machines using the MOS 6502 (Apple II, Atari 8-bit, Commodore 64 and 128). Here is his response to my emailed question: Date: Thu, 8 Aug 2002 18:54:51 -0400 From: Brian Moriarty To: Dave Subject: RE: porting Frotz to 6502 machines The original 6502 ZIPs were hand-written in assembler, and the resulting binaries were usually quite small (around 8k). Of course, a C compiler wouldn't be quite as efficient. The larger problem is that many of the later Z features (beyond version 2) simply won't work on an Atari, C64 or Apple II, either due to RAM, display or disk drive restrictions. When moving into versions 3 and beyond, we decided to leave that class of machine behind. -----Original Message----- From: Dave [mailto:dgriffi@cs.csubak.edu] Sent: Thursday, August 08, 2002 6:43 PM To: prof@ludix.com Subject: porting Frotz to 6502 machines Brian Moriarty, I was wondering if I could pick your brain a bit on Z-machine portability. One of the ongoing goals for the Frotz project is extreme portability, including to all sorts of old architectures. I've been pondering porting Frotz to 6502 machines such as the C64, Apple II, and Atari 8-bit computers. Doing some investigation with the CC65 6502 C compiler brought me to the conclusion that Frotz would produce a binary too large to fit in the memory of these machines. Apple IIgs might work. Given your work on making Z-machine interpreters for these machines (albeit in assembly, I assume) would this be an accurate assumption? Also, given what I've found out about the new upcoming IMSAI Series 2 machine, this might be capable of handling Frotz.