Greetings!

I am almost ashamed to offer this...

I am NOT a programmer by anyone's view, least of all my own. But I just happen to have access to a nice big Solaris 8 testing box at the office. After building the machine, I had to put a compiler on it, and could not resist dumping the empeg toolchain onto it too...

So, in order to test it, I downloaded the source to a very basic Frotz engine (dumb-frotz, version 2.32r1 port by Alembic Petrofsky, built for standard C and dumb terminal type environments). It actually cross compiled right on the first shot!

Again, I am not a coder. I got lucky, and have not really tested it, other than starting it up with Zork. I may look into other, more powerful Frotz implementation in my infinite spare time. Also, it runs on console - I have not messed with output to the empeg display itself yet. But it is something for the extreme retrogamers out there. Enjoy!!!

Disclaimer: Any bugs you find are your own problem! I really should not be playing with this right now, but it was a good way to test the compiler on the box (at least, I can justify it to my management that way).

Sweet! I'll have to try this out soon. If someone got one of the IR keyboards working, along with output to the display (which would be very easy with GD or the new VFDlib) passengers could play Zork on their Empeg in the car! That would be sweet.

Mark Lord, if you're reading this, weren't you hacking at some kind of IR keyboard thing at one time? Anyone else out there try it?

Greetings!

I have been thinking about output to the display. There is such a small text window, playing / reading would be tedious. Maybe the buttons for some navigation...

Maybe Telegard would be a better port for using the display.... Hmm... I can just hear it now... "Sorry I ran the light, officer, but I was killing the troll with the sword..."

There is such a small text window, playing / reading would be tedious.

Well, in emptriv I have a tiny font that kinda mimics the player's smallest font. It's like 5 points high so I think it works out to 5 lines high by maybe 30-40 characters wide. I implemented a paging thing with the real long trivia questions too, that seemed to work okay. I think it could actually work!

Maybe the buttons for some navigation...

Yeah, but there's some problems... First, the games all have secondary directions like northeast and southwest, plus they have "up" and "down." I think any kind of navigation thing would have to be done from a little popup menu or something. Not enough buttons for all the directions.

Throw in the fact that they're all based on typing in words ("look grue") and I think you'd *really* need an IR keyboard to make things work.

Now, a game like Legend of the Red Dragon would be a different story... I've dreamed of LoRD on the Empeg, but I think the Linux port was rumored but never actually done.

"You are on an interstate, and come across an exit... you can:
<T>ry and pass the slow car in front of you in the EXIT ONLY lane,
<E>xit the interstate and hope to have better luck on the US highway,
<C>ompletely ignore the exit, and keep watching the Empeg's Visuals."

I'd hope you're not watching the empeg's visual whilst driving personally Otherwise you might get a real life demonstration of the casualty visual!

- Trevor

Out of curiosity, did you build the toolchain yourself, or did you use my package? I never got around to actually testing the package itself, so it'd be good to know that it works.

Greetings!

I used your package! Sorry, I meant to write, but never got around to it. The Solaris 8 package worked perfectly for this.