Frotz - an interactive fiction plugin for Koreader

[kbarni]

Frotz is an interactive fiction interpreter plugin to play IF games right from Koreader!

IF games were in vogue at the beginning of the PC era, at the end of the '70s and beginning of the '80s, with games like Zork, Planetfall, A Minf Forever Voyaging. The genre was well adapted to early computers, but it went out of mainstream with the introduction of stronger computers and multimedia capabilities.

However a small and devoted group continued to develop IF games, with more advanced parsers, pushing the limits of the genre that no other video games can achieve (e.g. manipulating words instead of objects in Counterfeit Monkey).

IF is still a game genre that is particularly well adapted for e-readers. It is text-heavy - so easy to read on the e-ink display, and doesn't need frequent redraws. In addition, reading enthusiasts should appreciate the quality interactive fiction games. Did I mention that these games are completely free?

Installation and running

Download the plugin from github. Unzip it to the koreader/plugins folder.

Start from the Tools menu -> Interactive fiction.

You might need to change the frotz binary in the bin folder - check the readme file to obtain the correct file for your device!

Features

• Accepts Z-machine games (.zX, .zblorb, .zlb) - most of the IF games are in this format
• Improved saving and loading (per game and slots), including autosave
• Game history management with auto restore
• Hide the on-screen keyboard when using external keyboard for full screen display
• Adjustable font size

Further resources

There are several dedicated webpages for IF games: IFDB and IFWiki are just two of them. They have all the games, with recommendation lists, reviews, contest results and other articles.

Gargoyle is a more polished IF interpreter which supports graphics, advanced text formatting and more formats. It is available for Kindle.

Frotz interpreter is developed by David Griffith and distributed under GPL 2 license.

Full source code here.