Frotz Crashes To Desktop


Niksta

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Joined
May 16, 2010
Messages
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I hope this is the right place to post a topic like this.

Frotz crashes to desktop every time I select a game. I've tried downloading it again, then downloading it from different sources (Repo, Apps, author's beta testing thread) and I get the same result. There's no error message: I just click 'OK' after selecting the story file, the file selection screen disappears and nothing happens.

Has anyone else encountered this?
 
I've had similar problems, though it's been a while since I tried Frotz on the Pandora so I can't say if it was exactly the same problem.

As an alternative, there's a pnd of the Gargoyle interpreter that I used for a while before I got distracted, I got at least one game to run with it (the Lovecraftian horror game Anchorhead, which I highly recommend).
The Gargoyle pnd is easiest to find (in my opinion) on the Pandora wiki in the games list. I did find it on the app store just now as well, but as far as I can tell it wasn't showing up in any of the lists, I had to use the search function to find it.

I will have to go back and play around with it but I don't think I was able to get some Infocom games that I tried to work in Gargoyle (or Frotz); they might have been in the wrong format or something. I'm afraid I've forgotten most of what I knew about getting that stuff to work.

Anyone else have any advice? Now that I'm thinking about it, I'd love to be able to play my old Infocom games on the Pandora. Is there a specific format they have to be in?
 
I just tried it. The start-script within the PND seems to be faulty.

Start the game, let it crash/close, open a terminal and type:

Code:
cat /tmp/pndrun_frotz.cosam.2.43.0.0.out

You will see some errormessages. Obviously it tries to start in a "terminal" (xfce's terminal) which does not work.
I tracked it down to the last command "-x ..." and onward. "terminal" is a bit bitchy about what it takes as argument there. I noticed that before.

This is the workaround: Create a new "frotz.sh" in your appdata-folder of frotz (for me that is "/media/trans8/pandora/appdata/frotz.cosam.2.43.0.0/"), make it executable and edit it with the below content.

In a terminal as user:
Code:
cd /media/trans8/pandora/appdata/frotz.cosam.2.43.0.0/
touch frotz.sh
chmod +x frotz.sh
nano frotz.sh

then within nano enter (or copy/paste) the following:

Code:
#!/bin/sh

frotzfile="$(zenity --file-selection --title=\"Select a Story File\")"

terminal --title=Frotz \
        --icon=share/frotz.png \
        --fullscreen \
        --hide-menubar \
        --hide-toolbars \
        --hide-borders \
        -e "./frotz -r 2 -h 23 \"$frotzfile\""

Works for me.
 
Works for me too. Thank you.

I also needed to create Frotz's appdata directory.

I hope someone can update the PNDs as the app is currently useless without the workaround.
 
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