jzip: an alternative to frotz

jzip: an alternative to frotz

[Zachary Kline]

Hi,
In my attempts to find an interactive fiction interpreter which works
well with Speakup, I stumbled upon jzip.  This is a bit older than frotz
and isn't maintained, but it  supports all the modern interactive
fiction standards with the exception of blorb.  I thought of cutting my
teeth in C by trying to integrate Andrew Plotkin's Blorblib with it.
The termcap-based interface is compilable if you link with the ncurses
library.  It works quite nicely, and doesn't suffer from the frotz
habbit of repeating old text when the screen fills.
It can be found at the IF archive, in /interpreters-infocom-zcode/zip.
The version I have is from 2000, and unfortunately doesn't respect the
unix convention and extract into its own directory.
I'm not sure how many interactive fiction players are on this list, but
I thought I'd pass this along.
Best and enjoy,
Zack.

Re: jzip: an alternative to frotz

[Jason White]

Zachary Kline  <speakup@braille.uwo.ca> wrote:
>In my attempts to find an interactive fiction interpreter which works
>well with Speakup, I stumbled upon jzip.  This is a bit older than frotz
>and isn't maintained, but it  supports all the modern interactive
>fiction standards with the exception of blorb.  

There is also an interpreter written in Emacs Lisp, but I can't remember the
name.

I bought a Masterpieces of Infocom CD when they were still available for
purchase. Regrettably, other priorities haven't given me much opportunity to
enjoy the games, but as time becomes available in the future I will return to
them.

Computer games have never attracted my interest, with one exception, namely
interactive fiction, especially that by Infocom, which I remember playing as a
child on a friend's machine.

Re: jzip: an alternative to frotz

[Tony Baechler]

Hi,

Why not use Fizmo? It should also be in the IF Archive or can be found 
on spellbreaker.org. It's a Debian package which is how I found it, so 
you can get the source from any Debian mirror. Yes, it does Blorb. I've 
had good luck with it, but I prefer Frotz.

On 11/19/2009 8:16 PM, Zachary Kline wrote:
> In my attempts to find an interactive fiction interpreter which works
> well with Speakup, I stumbled upon jzip.  This is a bit older than frotz
> and isn't maintained, but it  supports all the modern interactive
> fiction standards with the exception of blorb.  I thought of cutting my
> teeth in C by trying to integrate Andrew Plotkin's Blorblib with it.
> The termcap-based interface is compilable if you link with the ncurses
> library.  It works quite nicely, and doesn't suffer from the frotz
> habbit of repeating old text when the screen fills.
> It can be found at the IF archive, in /interpreters-infocom-zcode/zip.
> The version I have is from 2000, and unfortunately doesn't respect the
> unix convention and extract into its own directory.
> I'm not sure how many interactive fiction players are on this list, but
> I thought I'd pass this along.
>