# Running Infocom Games

If you obtain one of Activision's compilations of the Infocom games on CD, or one of the original Infocom releases, then the games can be played by loading the Z-code file into Windows Frotz 2002. For all but the V6 graphical games, this is the file ending in .dat. For the V6 games, the Z-code file is the one ending in .zip (which is not to be confused with the zip archive format used by such programs as WinZip).

## Games with Sound

The Amiga release of The Lurking Horror and the Amiga and Macintosh releases of Sherlock both play sounds at points in the game.

In order to hear the sounds, the first step is to make sure that the Z-code game file is one of the releases that supports sound. This can be checked by looking at the release number that the game prints when it is first started in Windows Frotz 2002: Releases 219 and 221 of The Lurking Horror and release 26 of Sherlock support sound. If your Z-code game file is not one of these releases then patches are available to convert it to a suitable release at
http://www.ifarchive.org/indexes/if-archiveXinfocomXpatches.html

Windows Frotz 2002 does not support the sound files as originally released by Infocom. Kevin Bracey has converted these files into the Blorb resource format. The files can be downloaded from
http://www.ifarchive.org/indexes/if-archiveXinfocomXmediaXblorb.html

Make sure that the Blorb sound resource file has the same name as the Z-code game file (except for the .blb extension) and then simply load the Z-code game file into Windows Frotz 2002. You can test that sound is working by entering

      blow whistle
      wait

as the first two commands in Sherlock.

## Games with Graphics

Infocom's last four games (Arthur, Journey, Shogun and Zork Zero) were all released using an updated version of the Z-Machine, V6. This allowed these games to contain more elaborate graphics than previous Infocom games.

Windows Frotz 2002 does not support the graphics files as originally released by Infocom. Kevin Bracey has developed extensions to the Blorb resource format to allow the Infocom graphics to be converted into Blorb files, which can be downloaded from
http://www.ifarchive.org/indexes/if-archiveXinfocomXmediaXblorb.html

Make sure that the Blorb graphics resource file has the same name as the Z-code game file (except for the .blb extension) and then simply load the Z-code game file into Windows Frotz 2002.

The graphics Infocom included with these games were originally designed for a screen resolution of 320x200. Since this is much smaller than screen resolutions today, Windows Frotz 2002 has an option to set a factor by which these graphics are scaled. A scaling factor of 2 works well for resolutions of 800x600 and below; for higher resolutions at least 3 is recommended.

In addition, the Atari ST version of Beyond Zork came with a title picture. This picture has been converted to PNG and packaged into a Blorb file, which is available at the link given above for all the other Blorb files. If this Blorb file is present then Windows Frotz 2002 will show the title picture when Beyond Zork starts.