A patch to make Zarf's glkterm run on 64-bit machines

The glkterm library is the reference implementation of Zarf's glk interface standard for Interactive Fiction interpreters on systems that provide a ncurses library. Version 0.8.0 is available from Zarf's homepage here or from the Interactive Fiction Archive here. Unfortunately, the glkterm-0.8.0 library doesn't compile on 64-bit systems. There was a discussion about this issue on rec.arts.int-fiction and Zarf suggested a solution (see here). I forged that suggestion into a small, simple and dirty patch.

What you have to do:

  1. Download the glkterm library (version 0.8.0) from Zarf's site (here) or from the Interactive Fiction Archive (here) or from this site (here).

  2. Download my patch from here.

  3. Apply the patch:

    $ tar xzf glkterm-080.tar.gz
    $ gunzip glkterm-0.8.0_64bit-patch.diff.gz
    $ cat glkterm-0.8.0_64bit-patch.diff | patch -d glkterm

  4. Now you can make the glkterm library:

    $ cd glkterm
    $ make

That's all. This should work on any POSIX compliant system (it is tested on the amd64 port of Debian GNU/Linux "Lenny").

Installable binary packages of glkterm for Debian/Ubuntu that already contain this patch are available from here.

Feedback is welcome (send your rants to peer@wolldingwacht.de).

Legalese: The glkterm library is copyright © 1998-2000 by Andrew Plotkin. See the readme.txt file in the tarball for details. The code which is added to the glkterm library by the patch was written 2008 by Peer Schaefer and is hereby donated to the Public Domain.

2008-06-05 20:07:56 CET