FrobTADS is a full version of TADS for Unix, Linux, and Mac OS X.
TADS is a free authoring system for writing your own Interactive Fiction (IF). It offers a complete set of programming tools for creating high-quality IF.
TADS is a programming language and a virtual machine. It’s a C-like object oriented programming language for authoring Interactive Fiction (similar to the Infocom or Legend Entertainment games, like “Zork”). It offers a complete set of programming tools for creating high-quality IF. Games written in TADS are compiled to a platform-independent format that can be played on any computer for which a suitable virtual machine exists.
FrobTADS is a text-only interpreter that runs in a terminal window. If you want a full multimedia interpreter with full support for fonts and colors, images, sound, and all the other multimedia TADS features, I recommend a different open source package called QTads.
FrobTADS is not written from scratch; it uses Mike Roberts’ portable reference implementations of the two TADS virtual machines; the T2 VM (written in C) and T3 VM (written in C++). FrobTADS hooks into that code by providing a portable implementation of the TADS I/O API.
You need a TADS interpreter to play a TADS game file, which typically has an extension of “.gam” or “.t3”.
Features include:
- Complete system with compilers for both TADS 2 and 3A, together with a text-only TADS interpreter.
- Supports the latest features of TADS 3 including:
- Coloured text and backgrounds;
- TADS 3 banner windows;
- Timed input. It provides correct timing with timed operations (with millisecond precision).
- Input like in Frotz; cursor keys, insert, delete, etc., as opposed to Emacs-like input.
- Can run games that use HTML. Users won’t see any graphics nor hear sounds and music, but the games will play fine.
- Highly portable code. The software runs on a wide range of operating systems including Linux (all distributions), Mac OS X, various BSDs, old and modern Solaris, BeOS and Windows.
Website: www.tads.org
Support: Documentation, Blog, GitHub
Developer: Nikos Chantziaras
License: TADS 3 Freeware Source Code License
FrobTADS is written in C++. Learn C++ with our recommended free books and free tutorials.
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