To put it simply, Kevin Bracey's Zip 2000 is by far and away the most wonderful front-end you could ever hope for with which to play text adventures. It lets you play Infocom interactive fiction, or games written with the Inform compiler (which includes several very good free ones), in the comfort of your desktop, and takes advantage of screen modes with more than 256 colours if available. It makes wonderful use of outline fonts, and offers full 'point and click' mouse support where games allow it.

It seems to me that this program has to deal with all the display complexities of any web browser, but does it much better than any existing Acorn browser! To quote the release note, features include:

• Full support for Version 1,2,3,4,5,6,7 & 8 games
• Full conformance to Graham Nelson's "Specification of the Z-machine", Revision 0.2
• Graphics support
• Colour support
• Timed-input support
• Sound support
• Mouse support
• Menu support
• Full function key/cursor key/keypad support
• Full foreign language support (including runes)
• Easily adjustable screen size
• Full use of anti-aliased outline fonts
• Line editing & command recall
• Compressed save files (1/10th the size of ZIP's)
• Multiple UNDO
• High speed - the fastest Z-code interpreter for RISC OS
• The best-looking Z-code interpreter on any platform

To date I haven't found any bugs, either. It is so flexible that you can even use it to play the game of Life, should you so wish!

Kevin Bracey very generously allows Zip 2000 to be distributed absolutely free of charge. Perfectly fairly, however, he also provides an "improved" version of the already excellent software which includes full command-line editing and recall (which really is very useful), multiple undo, and the ability to alter the fonts used. In addition the free version doesn't allow version 6 game files to be saved - although this is unlikely to be a restriction unless you've actually bought some Infocom titles. Even then it only costs 10 pounds to upgrade, and more extra features are promised.

ftp://ftp.gmd.de/if-archive/infocom/interpreters/zip/Acorn_Zip2000_Std0.2.spk

Also, go and look at the Inform home page, Graham Nelson's superb adventure game compiler, which also includes details of how to get free Inform games:

http://www.gnelson.demon.co.uk/inform.htm

Please note that the screenshots on this page have been reduced in size and detail to reduce download times.

This web space provided by DoggySoft Ltd.