Overview

This is a Dockerized frotz interpreter for Infocom and other Z-Machine games.

This is built directly from the source repo maintained by David Griffith. This version of frotz is built without sound in order to compile and run properly in an Alpine Linux container.

You can also visit the Docker Hub repo.

Running

# create a container in interactive mode, mapping your local zfiles directory into the container. Change /home/frotz
# to anything that works for you to access the zfiles
docker run -ti -v $PWD/zfiles:/home/frotz newtmitch/frotz

# start a zfile
frotz telling.z5

Building

To build just for your local platform, simply run:

docker build newtmitch/frotz:latest .

To build a multi-platform image (ARM64 and AMD64) and push to Docker Hub, you can do that in a single step:

docker buildx build \
  --platform linux/amd64,linux/arm64 \
  -t newtmitch/frotz:latest \
  --push \
  .

Be sure to run docker login before you build with --push.

If you push to Docker Hub, also make sure to tag it with the latest build version per the Dockerfile:

docker tag newtmitch/frotz:latest newtmitch/frotz:2.55

Change Log

2026-03-18

• updated README with new build instructions - removed explicit version number
• updated Dockerfile build number with latest from source repo

2020-11-26

• Moved to alpine linux from ubutnu
• Building directly from source and latest mainstream release tag (instead of sourceforge binary)
• staged build for smaller final image
• Added README so people can actually use this image

2016 (sometime)

• Initial release