FrotzOS

I wanted to play some of those old text adventure games we used to play as kids. It’s easy enough to do with Javascript, but I wanted to make a baremetal OS, one that was sufficient to emulate the Z-machine.

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?)

Then I made some of the new classics into standalone images 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).