Free Games
Zip 2000

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.

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 1.0
• 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 and Unicode
• Easily adjustable screen size
• Full use of anti-aliased outline fonts (configurable)
• Full command line editing & command recall
• Compressed save files (1/10th the size of ZIP's)
• Quetzal-format save files
• Full alpha-compositing, dithering and gamma correction for PNG pictures
• Multiple UNDO
• High speed - the fastest Z-code interpreter for RISC OS
• The best-looking Z-code interpreter on any platform
• The most standards-compliant Z-code interpreter on any platform.

To give you an idea of the kinds of esoteric things this interpreter can do, you can even use it to play the game of Life should you so wish!

Kevin Bracey generously allows Zip 2000 to be distributed absolutely free of charge - originally you could pay a modest fee for an even better version, but the additiions that were in this are now included as standard.

Links
Download the latest version (1.40 7-Nov-01 at the time of writing) from:
http://www.bracey-griffith.freeserve.co.uk/Zip2000/
or Acorn Gaming

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

http://www.ifarchive.org/

(Please note that the screenshots on this page have been reduced in size).

...this page last updated: 12/11/01...
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