The Z-Machine Preservation Project

About

The Z-Machine Preservation Project (ZMPP) is an interpreter for Interactive Fiction on the Java Virtual Machine. It was originally written from scratch using Java 5 to create a Z-Machine implementation that is easy to understand maintain and extend.

The goal is to provide an interpreter implementation that is standard compliant and offers the possibility to play Interactive Fiction on many platforms without recompiling the source code, either as a desktop application or within the web browser.

Starting in 2010, ZMPP will also run games written for Andrew Plotkin's virtual machine standard Glulx, previews can be seen on the game page.

The current version supports the following features:

Download current version

The current version is 1.5, it can be downloaded from the Sourceforge project page or the Interactive Fiction Archive.

Games

As a demonstration, I setup a list of games that are representative showing both the nature of IF and the applet features of ZMPP:

Screenshot

ZMPP on other websites

Acknowledgements

Over its life span, ZMPP has more and more become a project of the Interactive Fiction community and I am very happy about it, a lot of ideas for improvement are now coming from its users. People, I want to explicitly thank here (in alphabetical order):