Meaningful Play

Saul Pwanson
github
resumes
Airbnb

FrotzOS

Sam wanted to play some of those old text adventure games we used to play as kids. He can't run native code and his browser is ancient, but he can launch an x86 virtual machine that's fast enough to emulate a Z-machine.
Zork
So I wrote a bootloader and minimal operating system for the frotz z-code interpreter to run on raw x86 virtual hardware. (It should run on actual hardware too, but who has any of that laying around anymore?)
screenshot of Zork on FrotzOS
Then I made some of the new classics into standalone images for him to play.

Curses!
(Graham Nelson, 1994)

Lost Pig
(Admiral Jota, 2007)

Instructions to play

  1. If you don't have a hypervisor installed already, download and install Virtualbox.
  2. Create a new virtual machine and add a floppy drive with the image inserted at start time.
  3. Launch the virtual machine and start playing!

On Linux, it's even easier:

  1. Install qemu.
  2. Run qemu-system-i386 Curses.img

Limitations

FrotzOS does not currently have SAVE/RESTORE functionality (would require a hard disk driver).

Source Code

The source code for FrotzOS is available at Github.
saul@pwanson.com