32 lines
1.7 KiB
Plaintext
32 lines
1.7 KiB
Plaintext
The dumb interface was mainly intended for those who wanted to play
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Interactive Fiction, but had just a C compiler and that's it. You get
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no screen control; everything is just printed to the terminal line by
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line. The terminal handles all the scrolling. While this can be an
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annoying way to play IF, it might be the best you can do for a
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particular machine, especially when the curses library is inadequate and
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installing ncurses isn't an option. It's also good for getting Frotz to
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run when you have a C compiler and know nothing else of how to do
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things. This way you can run Frotz on VMS, MVS, VM/CMS and all those
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other stodgy operating system. More on that later. Maybe you'd like to
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experience what it's like to play Adventure on a teletype.
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A much cooler use for compiling Frotz with the dumb interface is that it
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can be wrapped in CGI scripting, PHP, and the like to allow people to
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play games on webpages. I don't know how this is done, so don't ask me
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how. If you do know how, send me your code and documentation and I'll
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include it in the next release of Frotz.
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Games that move the write little windows of text over the main body of
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text are hard to read because with the dumb interface, Frotz doesn't
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know how to produce inverse text. Games that make use of timed-input
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can be played, but you must manually increment the timer (see the dfrotz
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manpage). Games that move the cursor around a lot are probably
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unplayable. These include games like Andrew Plotkin's "Freefall" and
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Torbjorn Andersson's "Robots".
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Games that make move the cursor around or write inverse banners in the
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middle of the text are likely to
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The dumb interface code was created by Alembic Petrofsky
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<alembic@petrofsky.berkeley.ca.us> in 1997 for Frotz 2.32.
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