FrobTADS

FrobTADS is a full version of TADS for Unix, written by Nikos Chantziaras. It supports most of the latest text-only TADS user interface features, including colored text and backgrounds, TADS 3 banner windows, and timed input. It's built to modern Unix standards, and includes automatic configuration for easy installation on all Linux versions and most other current Unix systems.

Downloads - Latest Release

• FrobTADS - this is the main package, with the full source for the combined Unix TADS 2 & 3 interpreter. [FrobTADS 0.13 - TADS VM 2.5.14/3.0.18.1, May 7, 2009]
• TADS 2 compiler add-on - this contains the additional source files for the TADS 2 compiler. You'll need the main FrobTADS package above in addition to this to build the compiler. [FrobTADS 0.13 - TADS VM 2.5.14, May 7, 2009]
• TADS 3 compiler add-on - this contains the additional files for the TADS 3 compiler. You'll need the main FrobTADS package above in addition to this to build the compiler. [FrobTADS 0.13 - TADS compiler 3.0.18.1, May 7, 2009]

	Mac OS users: the Macports package is a version of FrobTADS customized for Mac OS. This package has a streamlined installation process that makes it easy to get up and running.
	Note to Linux users: If your Linux distribution's repositories don't contain an up-to-date version of FrobTADS, you can usually find recent Debian and RPM packages on http://ifiction.free.fr/index.php?id=iflinux. Gentoo Linux users might be interested in the 'interactive-fiction' overlay, which can be accessed with the 'layman' utility.

Work in Progress

You can get the latest "work in progress" version from the public FrobTADS Git repository:

http://code.assembla.com/frobtads/git/nodes/master

FrobTADS vs. QTADS

Nikos is also the author of another recent Unix TADS interpreter, QTads, so you might wonder what the difference is between FrobTADS and QTads. Both are text-only TADS interpreters, which means that they only support TADS's text features, not the extended graphical features of HTML TADS (so they can show colored text, boldface text, and TADS 3 banner windows, but they can't show different fonts or text sizes, or display pictures, or play sounds, or handle HTML table layout). Both are Unix-based, and both are new code bases that follow modern Unix portability practices.

So what's the difference? The difference is in which part of the operating system they use to show their user interfaces. FrobTADS is a character-mode application, which means that it runs in a terminal window and can only display a monospaced font. QTads, on the other hand, is a GUI application; it runs under the native window system (such as X Windows), and it can use proportionally-spaced fonts.

The difference is most obvious when you compare screen shots for the two systems.

Contacting the author

If you have comments or questions or bug reports regarding FrobTADS, you should contact Nikos. His email address is realnc at users dot sourceforge dot net (converting the italicized words to punctuation, of course).

The old Unix versions

FrobTADS replaced an older Unix port of TADS, originally created by Dave Baggett in the late 1980s and maintained over the years by several successors. Unix has evolved considerably since Dave's original work, and it eventually got to the point that it made more sense to start with a clean slate, developing a new version from the ground up to modern Unix standards.

For most Unix users, FrobTADS should be an across-the-board improvement over the old Unix port. Even so, FrobTADS is still relatively early in its lifecycle, and as such it might still have some rough edges.

If you have trouble getting FrobTADS working on your system or with a particular game, or if you just prefer not to use software until it's achieved full maturity, the old Unix port is still available. You can find it on the IF Archive (www.ifarchive.org):

• Linux: download the TADS for Linux package from the TADS executables directory (programming/tads2/executables). As of this writing, note that the Linux executables package is not up-to-date, so you might want to download the generic Unix source bundle instead; the Unix source set works on Linux and many other Unix-based platforms.
• Other Unix systems: download the Unix source bundle from the programming/tads2/source directory. Follow the instructions in the README file to compile the TADS tools for your system.