TADS games can be run on most popular modern computers. If your machine has at least a megabyte or two of memory, there’s a good chance you’ll be able to play a game written in TADS. This is possible because TADS uses what’s known as a machine-independent design.

TADS games consist of two pieces - the game file itself, and a generic interpreter or runtime program that is specifically written for each computer operating system. Think of the TADS game file as a videocassette and the interpreter as a VCR. Once you’ve got the right interpreter (VCR) for your computer you can play any TADS game (cassette) that you like.

 

Text-only or multimedia?

There are two basic types of TADS interpreters out there.

Text-only TADS interpreters. These programs can only display text on the screen. This may include some limited formatting - bold text, horizontal rules, accented international characters - but does not include full multimedia features such as images and sound.

Multimedia TADS interpreters. These programs can display graphics, play sounds, use different fonts, etc. Since the first multimedia TADS interpreter available was called HTML TADS, sometimes the name “HTML TADS” is used to refer to the entire multimedia TADS system.

Some interpreters can only play text-only TADS games and some can play both text-only and multimedia TADS games. Each interpreter says which type of games it can play when it starts up.

 

Finding an interpreter
The first step in playing a TADS game is finding a TADS interpreter that runs on your computer. You can either go directly to the TADS executables directory in the IF archive or check out one of these pages:


Other Operating Systems
Unfortunately, if you don’t have a computer running one of the operating systems above you won’t be able to play TADS games. However, if you have the ability to compile C programs (and debug them to find out why they don’t work) you should be able to port the TADS interpreter to your computer of choice. The TADS source code is freely available, which makes this all possible.

http://ifarchive.org/if-archive/programming/tads2/source/ (US mirror)

If you can’t compile C programs I’m afraid you’ll just have to wait and hope someone comes along and feels like porting TADS to your OS of choice. If your operating system isn’t too obscure someone will undoubtedly step forward and volunteer their services.

 

Version Numbers
Over time there have been many improvements made to the TADS interpreter, and games have been written to take advantage of those new features. So it’s quite possible that you’ll find a newer game which works fine with the most recent version of the TADS interpreter, but which doesn’t work with old ones. For that reason you’re best off getting the latest interpreter for your operating system. (occasionally new games won’t work with old interpreters, but that’s less likely to be the case than the reverse)

Now the confusing thing here is that there may be two version numbers for you to deal with. There’s the version of TADS itself - the underlying code that makes up each interpreter - and then there’s the version of the particular interpreter for a given operating system. These numbers may or may not be the same.

For example, MaxTADS is a popular TADS interpreter for the Macintosh. At the time I originally wrote this document, it was at version 1.1.3, but the code base it was based on was TADS 2.2.6. However, HTML TADS for Win32 was at version 2.2.6, and was also based on TADS 2.2.6. Confusing.

The moral of the story is - you need to pay attention to the TADS version number associated with the interpreter. The actual version number of the particular interpreter is less important from the point of view of playing games.

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