I decided to port the Frotz Z-machine interpreter to the TI-Nspire, and here we are!

Basically it allows you to play various text adventure games, even some best-selling extremely popular game from the old times. Here's a short excerpt from Frotz's how-to-play guide, you'll quickly understand if you've never played text adventures:

With Interactive Fiction, you type your commands in plain English each
time you see the prompt which looks like this:

>

[...]

There are many differnet kinds of sentences used in interactive fiction.
Here are some examples:

> walk to the north
> west
> ne
> down
> take the birdcage
> read about dimwit flathead
> look up megaboz in the encyclopedia
> lie down in the pink sofa
> examine the shiny coin
> put the rusty key in the cardboard box
> show my bow tie to the bouncer
> hit the crawling crab with the giant nutcracker
> ask the cowardly king about the crown jewels

You can use multiple objects with certain verbs if you separate them by
the word "and" or by a comma. Here are some examples:

> take the book and the frog
> drop the jar of peanut butter, the spoon, and the lemming food
> put the egg and the pencil in the cabinet

(More information here and here.)

Here for example I'm playing the still popular Zork of the 80's:



Or The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy:



This is still an early version of nFrotz, so some games do not work at all. But I've included three games that have at some point been very popular (the two mentioned above and The Lurking Horror), they should work fairly well; have had zero issues myself.

Download the latest nFrotz (attached), copy it on your calculator and launch it. It should ask you to install nFrotz (all it does is it adds a file association rule to your ndless.cfg.tns file), once done you should be able to play any games with a .z extension. You need a recent version of Ndless that supports file associations! (couldn't be arsed to write a file browser, it's more elegant this way)

Here are the download links for the games I talked about that you can try out yourself:

• Zork I: The Great Underground Empire (1980)
• The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy (1984)
• The Lurking Horror (1987)

Aaand some on-calc footage:

Oh yes, to save your progress, type "save" and confirm. To restore your progress, type "restore".

Latest source code can be viewed on github.

Yay Zork

I actually had the idea to make a Z-Machine interpreter for the Nspire, that could load .z* files too... I was going to do it after the contest. Looks nice!

Is it possible to switch the text to black background or even change the color of both?

I have 2 questions about nFrotz:
1. There's no CX support, since it uses nspireio, right?
2. Can it load .z3, .z5, or .z8 files?

2. Can it load .z3, .z5, or .z8 files?

+1
In fact, I tried to put an adventure created with inform but it doesn't work.

hoffa has been in a place without Internet connectivity for a while, and I don't remember how long it's supposed to last, so you're unlikely to get a reply from him soon...

BTW, I know of a Joey whose family name starts with M and whose interests include text adventure games... is that you ?
In which case, FWIW, porting the TI-68k/AMS "advint" to the Nspire series would require porting all platform-, OS-specific code to the Nspire's OS / nSDL / some toolkit written on top of nSDL.

Hi Lionel,

Yeah this is me I forgot to mention that I recently got a TI-nSpire. So I have been looking into what can be done with it.

I was very happy to see this ported to the nSpire.