FrobTADS - A portable TADS toolkit. Maintained by Nikos Chantziaras . For the newest version, visit: http://www.tads.org/frobtads.htm By default, the FrobTADS source-package only contains the interpreter. See the file COMPILERS on where to obtain and how to install the TADS 2 and TADS 3 development tools, and on where to look for documentation in order to get started with developing your own games. For more information about TADS, visit its home page: http://www.tads.org Platforms ========= FrobTADS is known to compile and run on various platforms, including: Linux (all flavors), Mac OS X, various BSDs, old and modern Solaris, BeOS and Microsoft Windows. If you manage to run FrobTADS on a system not mentioned above, please let the maintainer know about it. About TADS and FrobTADS ======================= TADS stands for "Text Adventure Development System". It's a set of tools that allow easy implementation of text adventures, or "Interactive Fiction". The tools include a compiler along with supporting libraries, a debugger and an interpreter. An interpreter is needed to run the compiler's output, as it generates "byte code" programs (much like Java). The primary target of TADS nowadays is Microsoft Windows (although MS-DOS is still supported). FrobTADS is a "portable port" of the TADS toolkit. The term "portable port" sure sounds funny, but it's a quite accurate description; although the main target of FrobTADS is Unix, it compiles and runs even in MS Windows. Therefore, it's a portable port :-) The main development takes place on a Linux PC. Not everything is included in FrobTADS yet; for now, there are no debuggers available. On the other hand, the compilers and interpreters are (I hope) feature-complete. FrobTADS is not written from scratch; it uses Mike Roberts' portable reference implementations of the two TADS virtual machines; the T2 VM (written in C) and T3 VM (written in C++). FrobTADS hooks-in into that code by providing a portable implementation of the TADS I/O API. Goals ===== FrobTADS has been written as a replacement for the "traditional" Unix-port of TADS, which has many problems and limitations, and is difficult to maintain and change. The FrobTADS interpreter also provides some features that the traditional Unix-port lacks, the most important of them being: - Automatic configuration prior to building; no need to edit makefiles. - TADS 3 color support and configurable default colors. - Correct timing with timed operations (millisecond-precision). - Input like in Frotz; cursor keys, insert, delete, etc., instead of Emacs-like input. - TADS 3 banners look as they should. - You are not required to install the package prior to running the TADS 3 test suite. - File I/O initiated by the game will happen in the game's directory. This means that you don't have to change to the game's directory prior to starting the interpreter. - Less source code (and also less complex), more comments. - More portable. The ultimate goal is to make FrobTADS compile and run out-of-the-box on every system that has a curses library and a Unix-like shell available. What is Multimedia TADS? ======================== Multimedia TADS (also known as "HTML TADS") is an extension of TADS that uses HTML to provide multimedia capabilities. Multimedia TADS is not an extension of the two TADS languages (TADS 2 and 3), but rather of their output system. Although FrobTADS, being a character-mode interpreter, doesn't support most of the HTML extensions, it *can* run games that use HTML; on the binary level, Multimedia TADS and "plain" TADS executables are actually the same thing. You won't see any graphics nor hear sounds and music, but the game will play just fine. In TADS 2 games, you also won't see any banners that the game would otherwise display (TADS 3 games don't use HTML for banners; FrobTADS provides full support for TADS 3 banners). The vast majority of games don't use the multimedia extensions though, or use only the subset supported by FrobTADS. What's Interactive Fiction? =========================== Well, this is just a poor README file and therefore not the appropriate place for an introduction to Interactive Fiction. For more information about Interactive Fiction (or "IF" for short), just go to the TADS page (http://www.tads.org) and follow some links. Or go to the Google search engine (http://www.google.com) and search for "interactive fiction"; you'll be amazed about how many results you'll get. And you'll be even more amazed about how active the IF community is. There are two Usenet newsgroups for IF related things. The first is RGIF, which is short for: rec.games.int-fiction where people are talking about IF games in general; things they like in games, things they don't like, things they hope to see in future games, requests for hints and solutions, reviews of games, announcements of new games/software or happenings... Stuff like that. The other newsgroup is RAIF, which stands for: rec.arts.int-fiction This newsgroup is for everyone who is interested in creating games. Most IF authors use to hang around there, so this newsgroup is an excellent place to post questions about IF theory, authorship and programming. Your ISP should usually provide a newsserver which you can use to access Usenet. If not, you can use Google's web-based Usenet interface: http://groups.google.com/group/rec.games.int-fiction http://groups.google.com/group/rec.arts.int-fiction Where do I find games for FrobTADS? =================================== There's a large repository for IF-related stuff (with *lots* of games!) called "The Interactive Fiction Archive"; people usually just refer to it as "the Archive". You can access it by HTTP: http://www.ifarchive.org (very slow) or by FTP: ftp://ftp.ifarchive.org (also very slow) The archive has mirrors that are usually much faster. You should always access it through: http://mirror.ifarchive.org Please use this mirror instead of the main archive! You'll save yourself (and others) quite a few headaches. (The full list of mirrors is displayed in the main archive's title-page.) Since the archive is actually just a (huge) bunch of data thrown together (more or less), a nice fellow has created a site that will guide you through the archive. The site is called "Baf's Guide to the IF Archive" and is located at: http://wurb.com/if It contains many cool things, like a "Genre Map" for the games located in the archive along with descriptions, reviews and ratings, as well as many useful links.