Frotz 2.44 (for Unix) released

[David Griffith]

After holding off a few more days for some response on running DOS Frotz
on real hardware, I decided to go ahead and release Frotz 2.44 (for
Unix) source code. It should be visible in the IF Archive's
"unprocessed" directory in a day or two. Here are the highlights:

New Features:
- Blorb support implemented. No support for audio in Blorb files yet.
- Added an -m option for Dumb Frotz to suppress the [MORE] prompt.
- Makefile and code for compiling for 16-bit DOS.

Bug Fixes:
- Fixed a problem with saving and restoring in certain games.
- Added some fflush() calls to make Dumb Frotz more suitable for bot use.
- Removed old-style save support. It was getting hard to manage.
Only the Quetzal save file format is supported now.
- Fixed assorted minor 64-bitness problems.

The biggies that prompted me to make this release now were the problems
with saving and restoring. I will continue developing Frotz to bring
full audio support to the curses interface and eventually fold in an SDL
and/or GTK interface with full audio and graphical support. Hopefully
the result will resemble David Kinder's "Windows Frotz". As always, you
can follow the development at https://github.com/DavidGriffith/frotz

DOS Frotz 2.44 is mostly untested on real hardware. It works fine with
the DOSbox emulation environment. Testing on one particular machine
running FreeDOS yields crashes. That's the only non-emulated DOS machine
test I have. Details are at
https://github.com/DavidGriffith/frotz/issues/8

[Hannes Schüller]

Hi David!

Post by David Griffith
- Removed old-style save support. It was getting hard to manage.
Only the Quetzal save file format is supported now.

I remember there being a bug in the Quetzal save routine back in 2009.
Has this been fixed in the meantime?

Post by David Griffith
The biggies that prompted me to make this release now were the
problems with saving and restoring. I will continue developing Frotz
to bring full audio support to the curses interface and eventually
fold in an SDL and/or GTK interface with full audio and graphical
support.

Will this imply dropping the curses interface or will this SDL/GTK
stuff be optional?

As always, thank you very much for your work!

Hannes

[David Griffith]

Post by Hannes Schüller
Hi David!

Post by David Griffith
- Removed old-style save support. It was getting hard to manage.
Only the Quetzal save file format is supported now.

I remember there being a bug in the Quetzal save routine back in 2009.
Has this been fixed in the meantime?

What was the bug? A couple Quetzal bugs have indeed been fixed since then.

Post by Hannes Schüller

Post by David Griffith
The biggies that prompted me to make this release now were the
problems with saving and restoring. I will continue developing Frotz
to bring full audio support to the curses interface and eventually
fold in an SDL and/or GTK interface with full audio and graphical
support.

Will this imply dropping the curses interface or will this SDL/GTK
stuff be optional?
As always, thank you very much for your work!

The curses interface will always be available.

[Hannes Schüller]

Post by David Griffith

Post by Hannes Schüller

Post by David Griffith
- Removed old-style save support. It was getting hard to manage.
Only the Quetzal save file format is supported now.

I remember there being a bug in the Quetzal save routine back in
2009. Has this been fixed in the meantime?

What was the bug? A couple Quetzal bugs have indeed been fixed since then.

This one:
https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/rec.arts.int-fiction/Bq9BLwfLgHQ

Post by David Griffith

Post by Hannes Schüller

Post by David Griffith
The biggies that prompted me to make this release now were the
problems with saving and restoring. I will continue developing
Frotz to bring full audio support to the curses interface and
eventually fold in an SDL and/or GTK interface with full audio and
graphical support.

Will this imply dropping the curses interface or will this SDL/GTK
stuff be optional?
As always, thank you very much for your work!

The curses interface will always be available.

Phew, relieved :)

Hannes

[David Griffith]

Post by Hannes Schüller

Post by David Griffith

Post by Hannes Schüller

Post by David Griffith
- Removed old-style save support. It was getting hard to manage.
Only the Quetzal save file format is supported now.

I remember there being a bug in the Quetzal save routine back in
2009. Has this been fixed in the meantime?

What was the bug? A couple Quetzal bugs have indeed been fixed since then.

https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/rec.arts.int-fiction/Bq9BLwfLgHQ

Ya, that was fixed. See
https://github.com/DavidGriffith/frotz/commit/ce2f83ecb0 I don't know
why it wasn't fixed earlier. It was the main impetus for releasing
2.44.

Post by Hannes Schüller

Post by David Griffith

Post by Hannes Schüller

Post by David Griffith
The biggies that prompted me to make this release now were the
problems with saving and restoring. I will continue developing
Frotz to bring full audio support to the curses interface and
eventually fold in an SDL and/or GTK interface with full audio and
graphical support.

Will this imply dropping the curses interface or will this SDL/GTK
stuff be optional?
As always, thank you very much for your work!

The curses interface will always be available.

Phew, relieved :)

No problem.

[Hannes Schüller]

Hi again,

I just pulled the latest source and compiled it (Linux). There is still
one major issue remaining (which I've always encountered in all previous
versions) in case of non-English games (UTF-8 system locale). Frotz
handles output of special characters (like ä, ö or ü) fine. However, it
won't accept the same characters as input, receiving ä, ö and ü
respectively (typical issue of not handling Unicode). Are there any
special build flags I've missed?

Hannes

[David Griffith]

Post by Hannes Schüller
Hi again,
I just pulled the latest source and compiled it (Linux). There is still
one major issue remaining (which I've always encountered in all previous
versions) in case of non-English games (UTF-8 system locale). Frotz
handles output of special characters (like ä, ö or ü) fine. However, it
won't accept the same characters as input, receiving ä, ö and ü
respectively (typical issue of not handling Unicode). Are there any
special build flags I've missed?

I've resisted putting full Unicode support in because it has caused odd
problems with the DOS port. That work has been pushed back to 2.45 (or
2.50, I haven't decided what I'll call it). I'm thinking that perhaps
the best way of doing this is to have a compile-time option for Unicode
support for which DOS will be incompatible.

[Hannes Schüller]

Post by David Griffith

Post by Hannes Schüller
I just pulled the latest source and compiled it (Linux). There is
still one major issue remaining (which I've always encountered in
all previous versions) in case of non-English games (UTF-8 system
locale). Frotz handles output of special characters (like ä, ö or
ü) fine. However, it won't accept the same characters as input,
receiving ä, ö and ü respectively (typical issue of not handling
Unicode). Are there any special build flags I've missed?

I've resisted putting full Unicode support in because it has caused
odd problems with the DOS port. That work has been pushed back to
2.45 (or 2.50, I haven't decided what I'll call it). I'm thinking
that perhaps the best way of doing this is to have a compile-time
option for Unicode support for which DOS will be incompatible.

Alright, looking forward to this next release then :)

Hannes

[Li Sun]

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