IFP Home Page

Author: Simon Baldwin <simon_baldwin@yahoo.com>
Date: 9th May 2005

Overview

IFP is a plugin scheme for playing Interactive Fiction on Linux systems.  It combines a number of interpreters, written for distinct Interactive Fiction game systems, into a single runnable program.

As of the current release, 1.3, here's what IFP can do:

Summary

IFP plays several different types of Interactive Fiction game files using a single game playing application program, and a set of game interpreter plugins.  The program automatically determines how to play the game from the data in the game file, and the different game files are all handled seamlessly.  The current implementation contains plugins to handle game files in the following formats:

Z-machine, TADS, HUGO, Alan, Glulx, AGT, AdvSys, Level 9, Magnetic Scrolls, Adrift, and Blorb

For Blorb files, IFP recognizes ZCOD (Z-machine) and GLUL (Glulx) executable types.

IFP can directly handle Compressed, Gzipped, or Bzipped game files, and game files, compressed or otherwise, contained in Zip, Tar, or Cpio archives.  It can also handle URL references to game files, compressed game files, or game archives.

legion /home/my_account/my_files/toonesia.gam
legion /home/my_account/my_files/bear.z5.gz
legion http://www.ifarchive.org/if-archive/games/zcode/curses.z5

Obtaining IFP

IFP release 1.3 is available in RPM binary and source format, and in plain old gzipped tar file format, through the following locations:

ifp-1.3-1.i386.rpm
ifp-1.3-1.src.rpm
ifp-1.3.tgz

If you have Debian Linux, you may want to use the Debian IFP binary package.  This is available at:

ifp_1.3-2_i386.deb

ar x ifp_1.3-1_i386.deb data.tar.gz
mv data.tar.gz ifp-1.3-binaries.tgz

Feedback

If you find a defect in IFP, I encourage you to please let me know, but please check the list of known IFP defects first.  I can be reached at simon_baldwin@yahoo.com.  I'd appreciate even more if you could send in a fix with your defect report :-)

Thank you, and have fun with IFP.
 

Changes List

The first release of IFP was version 0.1a.  The following list indicates changes made to IFP for release 0.2:

• Built Xglk library with 24-bit display patch.
• Added Glkterm build, and curses version of ifpe.  The previous ifpe is now xifpe.
• Extended URLs to download data via FTP, in addition to HTTP and local files.
• Remote URL data is now downloaded asynchronously, using SIGIO.
• Added a URL cache, so that playing the same URL multiple times requires only one download.
• Fixed a fault in the functions that reset Glk; this fault caused xlegion to crash after playing some games (notably Glulx).
• Fixed an omission where plugins failed to unload their plugin lists; this fault caused xlegion to crash on occasion after playing two or more compressed games of different game file types.
• IFP now automatically detects loading of plugins that may in turn load other plugins, and takes steps to ensure that the shared objects in each get their own private execution space.
• Added full Blorb support.  IFP can now handle Blorb files containing either Glulx or Z-machine games.

• Added the AGiliTy 1.1.1 interpreter, for AGT (and AGX) games.
• Use of hash tables for improved performance of memory allocation functions.

• Added the AdvSys 1.2 interpreter.
• Added the Level 9 interpreter (SNA format files only).
• Minor improvements to URL cache code.
• Fixed an omission that caused xlegion to crash unpredictably some time after failing to uncompress a game.
• General code tidy up and internal adjustments.

• Added the Magnetic Scrolls interpreter.
• Updated to the latest versions of the Tads, Hugo, Level9, and AGiliTy interpreters.
• Made the Pkunzip plugin more lenient when unable to uncompress some archived files.
• Corrected #includes in IFP header files to work with any Glk library; previously, these #include'd some Xglk-specific header files.
• Minor internal interface adjustments, and some library error tightening.
• IFP is probably stable enough now to shake off the "beta" tag.

• Updated to the latest versions of the Tads, Hugo (twice), Level9, AGiliTy, and Magnetic Scrolls interpreters.
• Added a Nitfol patch to fix eight bit characters in Spanish games.
• Added a further Nitfol patch to fix null pointer dereferences in Nitfol's game debugging code.
• Applied an Xglk patch to permit eight bit characters to be entered.
• Added example games to the binary distribution.
• The usual minor internal adjustments and code improvements.

• Updated to the latest version of the Hugo interpreter, including graphics support.
• Updated to the latest version of the Magnetic Scrolls interpreter, now with graphics animations.
• Updated to the latest versions of the Level9 and AGiliTy interpreters.
• Updated to version 2.5.8 of the TADS2 interpreter.
• Added the SCARE interpreter to enable IFP to handle Adrift games.
• Additional patches to Nitfol to fix Z-machine V1 and V2 game problems.
• Yet more patches to Nitfol to mask display flicker and other miscellanea.
• Patches to Advsys to tidy up assorted Glk library complaints.
• Minor fixes to IFP HTTP and FTP URL download cancel functions.
• Defined Latin-1 as the native character set for Glkterm builds of IFP.
• Updated IFP's garbage collection hashing to enable it to cope with SCARE's extreme heap space demands.
• Other minor internal adjustments.

• Updated to the latest version of the Hugo interpreter, version 3.1.
• Updated to version 2.5.9 of the TADS2 interpreter.
• Updated to version 1.3.3 of the SCARE interpreter.
• Switched to building Nitfol without debugging, for improved stability.
  
• Optimized builds of the Glulx and Alan interpreters.
• Added dynamic loading of Glk libraries, and created three corresponding pluggable Glk's.
• Combined xifpe and ifpe into a single binary, with runtime Glk selection.
• Rewrote legion to run with all three supplied Glk libraries.
• Added IFP user-specific configurations and preferences through a .ifprc file.
  
• Removed non-essential material from the IFP library man pages.
  
• Copious internal code style changes, optimizations, and adjustments.