13 Aug 08
iPhone Frotz
So, ever since I upgraded my iPhone a few weeks ago, I’ve been poking through the AppStore, waiting to see apps that would replicate some of the fun stuff found on jailbroken iPhones. Frotz, an interactive fiction (IF, formerly “text adventure game”) emulator, was one of them, and it’s finally here! Looks like others have noticed as well, and I hope this gets more people to try out IF.
Ignore the ugly splash page, Frotz is pretty simple and fun — IF games are rendered completely in text and you only interact with it via text-based inputs. So, “go north” or “get lamp” or “burn pants,” etc. If you’re unfamiliar with the genre of game (which was, incidentally, the first ever genre of commercial computer games), check out Emily Short‘s excellent PDF explaining how to play IF.
Frotz comes with several games installed, and some great ones, too:
Anchorhead, Varicella, Curses!, Lost Pig, Photopia, Spider and Web, Slouching Towards Bedlam, A Change in the Weather, and even the old, original, MIT version of Zork. Additionally, it links to the IFDB, so you can check out new games:
The only difficulty (and this seems rather minor) is getting my old Infocom games (Zork, Planetfall, A Mind Forever Voyaging, etc.) uploaded onto the iPhone, but apparently there are now legit FTP clients that will make that happen for me.
At any rate, now I have more games to carry around in my pocket. Awesome.
Hey, I spent hours on that splash screen! I think it’s pretty good for ‘programmer art’. The text is a transcript from Spellbreaker, and the font for FROTZ is a font from the Encylopedia Frobozzica in Return to Zork.
By the way, to get Infocom data files on your phone and accessible by Frotz, you need to either:
1) Buy File Magnet (Mac only), and use it to transfer the .z# or .dat file to your phone, or
2) put the files on a local web server and use the IFDB Browser in Frotz to go to the page and download the file.
Haha, sorry! No offense intended, maybe I just don’t like purple. I had fun mocking up a new picture today, maybe I’ll mail it to you now. :-)
Thanks for the advice on how to get the Infocom games up to my iPhone! And thanks for working on this!
I really wish Frotz Iphone would be carried over to Mac OS X – simply because the presentation seems more satisfying than using the terminal in Mac OS X versions of Frotz I have seen.
Have you used Zoom or Spatterlight for Mac OS X? Both are excellent interpreters, IMHO.
This is great, but I was admittedly dissapointed when I clicked through to the IFDB and saw that A Mind Forever Voyaging wasn’t available for download. Anybody know another way to get that onto the phone in a manner that Frotz will read? I was also hoping to take a look at my own unfinished inform 7 game.
Doh, I can see that I skipped a comment above that showed how to do this.. oops.
Cool, glad you figured it out. Hey, if you ever need a tester for your IF game, give me a holler. I’d be happy to give it a look.
Hey, spathiwa, if you keep getting grief for your splash screen you can use this-
http://wileywiggins.com/frotz.png
There’s not enough of my game to test, unfortunately- it depended on a phone object that rings and forces you to run through some conversations, but I didn’t figure out a very elegant way to do it. What I’ve got is here: http://rewrit.es/zjU
Wiley, nice! Last summer, I sent spathiwa this mockup screen I made, too:
http://se4n.org/img/frotz1.png
It probably verges a bit too much on copyright infringement, however, but I dig it. :-)
I’ll take a look at your game soon… Thanks for sharing it!
spathiwa – I’ve got 33 of the original Infocom games “.DAT” and “.z3″ formats, but when I try to download into Frotz on iPhone get an error:
“Sorry, this story is not bundled with Frotz and can’t be downloaded. Visit the Frotz support page if you’d like to request it be bundled in a future update.”
Will your suggestion above no longer work?