tcl8.6 works fine.
Connection to FICS with tcl9 does throw error:
error reading "sock55770d081340": invalid or incomplete multibyte or wide character
root cause in fics.tcl:
fconfigure $sockchan -blocking 0 -buffering line -translation auto ;#-encoding iso8859-1 -translation crlf
workaround enable encoding:
fconfigure $sockchan -blocking 0 -buffering line -encoding iso8859-1 ;#-translation crlf
but this does not transfer all characters (like ü or ä for tcl8 and tcl9)
btw: please add a Milestone 5.2 for bugs