About fizmo

Detailed look at the fizmo interpreter.

Fizmo is a Z-Machine interpreter. That means it allows you to play interactive ficiton, also known as textadventures, which were implemented either by Infocom or created using the Inform compiler. It is a console-based interpreter, meaning that there is no graphical user interface, and works with all Z-machine versions except version 6. It should work on any POSIX compliant system with a ncursesw – note the trailing “w” – library. It has been successfully compiled on GNU/Linux, Mac OS X and Windows (on the latter using the Cygwin environment).

Fizmo supports all Z-Machine versions except version 6. It supports blorb files, manages a menu containing all known story files using babel files for metadata, provides sound output for AIFF and Infocom sound-files via the SDL libraries, supports unicode and localized interpreter messages, provides a scrollback buffer and a translation of the character graphics set (font #3) to unicode, handles resizing of the terminal window, supports the quetzal save file format standard – additionally provides the capability to invoke savegames directly and finds the matching story file by itself – and has experimental support for displaying a story file's frontispiece image into a X-Terminal. Furthermore, it provides all other capabilities of an interpreter trying to conform to the Z-machine 1.0 standard – color, styles, timed and preloaded input and even the ability to save – and replay – the timing of the input to or from a command file.

Compiling from source requires development libraries for ncurses complied with --enable-widec. If you want to use babel metadata, libxml2 is required. To enable sound output, development libraries for libsdl-sound version 1.2 are needed. If you want AIFF sound from blorb files, you'll also need libsndfile. Compilation was tested using gcc and works with GNU/Linux, Mac OS X and Cygwin.