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Play text adventures on os8088

Frotz brings Zork and other classic text adventures to os8088. Read the scene, type what you want to do, and find out what happens next.

stories included
15
years covered
1977 to 2007
controls
just the keyboard
How to run it Watch the video
Mini-Zork I
Mini-Zork I open on the os8088 desktop. The player stands west of a white house, opens a mailbox and reads the leaflet inside. A strip at the top shows the room, score and move count.
Mini-Zork I, running as an ordinary os8088 program. The dark strip is the status line -- where you are, and how you are doing. Everything under it is the story.

Meet Frotz

A small program for games made out of words.

A game made out of words

A text adventure describes where you are, then asks what you want to do. You might type open mailbox, go north or take lamp. The game tells you what happened and waits for your next move.

Infocom made the best-known examples in the 1980s, including Zork, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy and Planetfall. New text adventures are still being written today.

How those old games still run

Infocom saved each game as a portable story file. A small player program translated that file for whichever computer you owned. The story stayed the same; only the player changed.

Frotz is that player for os8088. Open a compatible story file and it becomes an ordinary window on the desktop, complete with scrolling text, saved games and simple sound.

About the name: This Frotz was written from scratch for os8088. It is separate from the better-known Frotz program, but shares the traditional name -- taken from a spell in the Infocom game Enchanter.

Watch it run

See a story opened, played and saved on os8088.

Nothing is sent to YouTube until you press play. The still above is served from this site.

The games

From the adventure that started it all to a modern story told in changing colours.

Colossal Cave Adventure
Colossal Cave Adventure open on os8088. The player enters a small brick building and finds a bottle of water, a brass lamp, food and keys.
Colossal Cave Adventure, 1977. The game that established the form. You begin near a small brick building, collect a brass lamp and soon find a much larger world underground.
Zork: The Undiscovered Underground
Zork: The Undiscovered Underground open on os8088. The Grand Inquisitor sends the player into the Great Underground Empire, and a MORE prompt pauses the long introduction.
Zork: The Undiscovered Underground, 1997. A short official return to the Great Underground Empire, released for free by Activision. The [MORE] prompt pauses a long passage until you press a key.
Photopia
Photopia open on os8088. Against a dark screen, one character asks for a story and another suggests they tell one together.
Photopia, 1998. Adam Cadre's award-winning story is more interested in telling a tale than setting puzzles. It changes colour between scenes; on os8088, those changes appear as black or reversed text.
The story floppy
The INFOCOM folder open on the os8088 desktop, showing Mini-Zork I, two Infocom sampler disks and Zork: The Undiscovered Underground.
Where the stories live. The included games are grouped into Infocom, classic and modern folders. You can also copy compatible stories you already own onto the disk.

How to play

Read the scene, type a command, and see what changes.

A turn

The story waits for you

Each turn starts with a description and a prompt. Type what you want to try -- open mailbox, for example -- and press Enter. The story prints the result, then waits for the next command.

In the older games, the dark strip at the top names the room and keeps the score and move count. When a passage is too long for the window, [MORE] pauses it until you press a key.

Commands

Use verbs, objects and directions

look repeats the room description. inventory lists what you are carrying. Move with north, south, east and west, or shorten them to n, s, e and w. Actions can be as direct as take lamp or unlock door with key.

These games know a large but fixed set of words. If one does not understand a sentence, try a shorter version, use a different verb, or examine the things the room mentions.

Exploring

You keep the map

Rooms join in compass directions, doors may be locked, and useful objects can be rooms away from the puzzle they solve. The game remembers where everything is; keeping track of the route is up to you.

Most of these stories reward poking at details. Read the leaflet, open the trapdoor, turn the machine on, ask a character about something. The next step is often hidden in a line that first looked like scenery.

Keeping your place

Save before trying anything foolish

File › Save Game... records the current turn; File › Restore Game... brings it back. You can even move a saved game between os8088 and a modern text-adventure player on a laptop.

The scroll bar goes back through text that has left the window. Story › Transcript keeps a text copy of the playthrough.

A few limits

The all-text games are the best fit. A few later features are simpler here.

  • No timed challenges. If a game has scenes that expect a response within a few seconds, it is told to use its untimed path instead.
  • Sound stays simple. Beeps and tones work. Recorded effects are replaced with the nearest tone.
  • Some pictures will be missing. Games made mostly from text are the safest choice. Frotz can show its own picture files, but not the picture files that shipped with Infocom's illustrated games.
  • Very large stories may not fit. If there is not enough memory, Frotz says so before the game starts. Every story on the included disk fits the recommended machines.

Try it yourself

Build the story disk, put it in drive B, and choose a game.

  1. Build the story disk from the os8088 source. Frotz and its games do not fit on the regular software disk, so they get a disk of their own. This command downloads the stories their authors have shared for free and puts everything together:

    make zdisk

  2. Boot os8088 with the story disk as the second floppy, then double-click Disk B on the desktop.

  3. Choose a game. Double-click a story in the Infocom, Classic or Modern folder, or open Frotz first and use File › Open Story....

About the included Infocom games: Mini-Zork I, the two Sampler disks and Zork: The Undiscovered Underground were released for free. Zork I to III, The Hitchhiker's Guide and Planetfall are still sold, so they are not included. If you own them, you can add your copies to the story disk.

The included IBM XT and 386 setups are both ready for Frotz. Pick either one when you want to play.

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