Bert Frac

Bert Frac History

Original Frac

Ah the good old days! 386 computers, your entire "digital life" could fit on 1 or 2 floppy disks, you could slow down your computer by depressing the Turbo button!

I was in the army at the time, and a collegue was playing that "Tetris like" game in 3D. I was instantly hooked! I played this game more than any other game I ever owned.

The original Frac was published by Simsalabim Software. It can still be found on archive sites.

Screenshots:

Linux (i)FRAC

Fast forward to 2013, I was looking around for that original game, or a more recent version and I found (i)FRAC. Another Frac enthusiast coded the game on Linux, in C.

It was a bit of a challenge to get it to compile on Mint (done for Mint 12 up to 17). And the result is not perfect. Some text is garbled, it outputs error messages on the console, but it works enough for me to play.

I did modify the controls a little bit since I like to drop pieces with the keypad 0. This arrangement allows me to play with my right hand only and my old reflexes from the original Frac days soon came back.

I cannot find the original site for (i)FRAC anymore, but the code is still available on archive sites.

Screenshots:

My version, javascript web page

So an old MS-DOS version, and a flaky version on Linux (probably due to my compilation). Let's try something else...

I like to learn technologies by forcing myself to use them. I built basic web sites to learn HTML, then bigger ones for proper CSS, and PHP, then I found BootStrap (and it became fun again! Multi-browser CSS is NOT fun...).

The next logical step was Javascript, and I wanted something more than just basic web page widgets.

However I did not want to code the 3D canvas part myself, so I looked around and found Cango3D. I found it easy to learn and use, and well documented. That last point is major, considering the large volume of undocumented code on the Internet! I use version 7v09.

It was a fun project and it has given me a greater respect for Javascript. It is much more than a "dynamic menu" or web page widget language after all!

Licenses

Bert Frac by Martin Bertrand is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.

Cango3D: Dr A R Collins gets full credit for Cango3D.

Frac code: I did not use Frac code in my implementation. In fact I have never seen the code.

(i)FRAC: I did not use (i)FRAC code in my implementation. The only thing I looked at was the frequency at which each piece was randomly selected.

Bootstrap and JQuery: usage allowed by their respective licenses.

Bert Frac by Martin Bertrand is licensed under a
Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.