FrobTADS

FrobTADS is a new version of TADS for Unix, written by Nikos Chantziaras.

Before FrobTADS, the Unix version of TADS had always been based on code written by Dave Baggett in the late 1980s to support TADS version 1 on Unix. The longevity of that code is pretty amazing, and says a lot about the quality of Dave's original work and the dedication of the people who've added to it and kept it working over the years. But the code has finally been showing its age of late, and it's become increasingly difficult to maintain it and to extend it to take advantage of the latest features in TADS and in Unix.

FrobTADS is a complete rewrite of the Unix version. It adds support for a number of relatively recent TADS user interface features that were missing from the old Unix version, including full support for text and background colors, TADS 3 banner windows, and timed input. It's also much more portable and more easily maintainable, as it's built to modern Unix standards. And installing FrobTADS is greatly simplified compared to the old Unix port, thanks to automatic configuration.

Downloads - Latest Official Release

• FrobTADS - this is the main package, with the full source for the combined Unix TADS 2 & 3 interpreter. [FrobTADS 0.11 - TADS VM 2.5.10/3.0.16, April 14, 2008]
• 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 0.11 - TADS VM 2.5.10, April 14, 2008]
• 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 0.11 - TADS VM 3.0.16, April 14, 2008]

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 version

For most Unix users, FrobTADS should be an across-the-board improvement over the old Unix port. Even so, FrobTADS is still 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 a bit more broken in, 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.