Which browser engine does it use?
Heh, I had to go on the net and look for a feature list. 
- Built-in Opera Mini browser
Though when I started looking, I found I could try and install different browsers. One of them is Opera 10, on which Quixe has been tested. Seems intriguing… I just hope I don’t break the thing trying to play GLulx on it. 
Well, I don’t enjoy disappointing people, but I suspect a phone using J2ME should be pretty weak when it comes to CPU power. So even if it runs Quixe, the JavaScript engine is going to run so slow you might have time to make coffee between turns :mrgreen:
Opera Mini is a strange browser and doesn’t really support Javascript, so it won’t be able to run Parchment or Quixe.
yep, Opera mini is a javascript no-no. Android comes with a webkit browser with good support for javascript and is able to run parchment, swype keyboard and all.
Oh, what a pity… and I can’t find any other browser compatible with NC3. Blast.
Ah well. Another reason to keep the ZMachine alive, eh?
Oh heck, this is frustrating. With Opera Mini 5.1, it actually does load the applet, and the speed seems decent, but I can’t actually do anything. Once I type in a command, there seems to be no way to make the browser understand I want the applet to accept a carriage return. Nor can I get the browser to open files in my bloody phone. Frustrating!
I’m playing if on my Android phone. Installed Twisty and it seems to work fine for me. Playing the games that come with it and javw downloaded a few. Sometimes the scroll down menus can be a bit temperamental.
I played an hour or two into Anchorhead using something called Hunky Punk on my Android G1. It seemed to work fairly well.
My wife has been playing on Hunky Punk for several weeks now on her Android phone; this is her only exposure to IF, so it can’t be too horrible an experience. I keep trying to get her to try it on her laptop, but she only gets short windows of time to play when neither kid desperately needs her attention… I suspect she’s probably played almost as much as I have, but in 5-10 minute increments…
Thank you so much for this. Hunky Punk seems awesome so far.
I really prefer playing IF on portable devices; it fits both my tastes and my schedule better than playing on my home 'puter or laptop. For a long time, this meant GBA Frotz, then DS Frotz … but when my portable-gizmo attention turned to my Android phone, my experiences with Twisty left me … well, playing IF a lot less, basically.
Hunky Punk not only does the job beautifully (Swype support, pulling covers and info from the IFDB, etc) it also has the one feature that none of my prior portable-frotzy things ever had: saving transcripts, so I can finally test WIPs portably as well. Heck yeah.
It even plays ToaSK without noticeable lag … the first portable 'terp I’ve seen do that!
twisty for android seemed very nice, but it crashed all the time. hunky punk has a nice interface, looks good and works very well. best part is that it remebers where you left off so you don’t need to save when you get out of the subway. with twisty, if you ran a couple of apps after it, all was lost. now we just need some sort of automap
I’m trying out HunkyPunk based ont he above , but whenever i try to open a story file the app crashes. I’ve sent a crashlog to the developers listed email address but not heard anything back. According the the Android Market a lot of people are seeing this.
Rob
I haven’t had any crashes, but HunkyPunk is sometimes troubled by long text-dumps; it doesn’t know quite how to display them 
Yeah, I have the same bug on my phone. I’m quite sad about the state of interactive fiction on Android, actually. I got a phone with a QWERTY keyboard largely because I wanted to be able to play IF on it. I’ve been trying to play Savoir Faire - it’s been on my wishlist for years and seems ideal for playing 15 minutes at a time on public transport - but I haven’t managed to get a single interpreter to run it properly. Hunky Punk crashes when starting a game. Twisty 0.8 replaces punctuation with stray letters of the alphabet. Twisty 2.0 crashes when restoring a game. Parchment doesn’t always want to load, and when it does it’s too wide for the phone screen, even in landscape orientation (and the Android browser won’t let me zoom out any further).
On the upside, Twisty 0.8 is running Planetfall quite well, with only occasional crashes after the phone goes into stand-by.
Does your phone support J2ME applications? If so, have you tried ZaxMidlet?
I’ve found that a few games - a very few - crash the interpreter (Deadline being, unfortunately, one of them), but I e-mail the author of ZaxMidlet every time that happens, letting him know exactly what the problem was. I’ve had a couple of replies which suggest that he’s a bit busy right now but intends to look into it.
I like ZaxMidlet.
I just downloaded Hunky Punk, and it doesn’t seem bad. I’d like the option to select a game by filename rather than the internal name (I have three games whose internal name Hunky Punk reports as “Adventure” - one is the original 350-point Crowther-and-Woods version, one is the Humongous Cave 1000-point version, and one is the 350-point version, but with the Enchanter trilogy’s magic system). It does not seem to handle “Press Space” properly; while Twisty does indeed proceed when you press space, with Hunky Punk, you have to press Enter. I haven’t hit any FCs with Hunky Punk yet, but give it time; Twisty does have fairly frequent FCs, but in my experience, only immediately on startup; if it doesn’t FC then, it won’t FC until some future invocation.
I like the cover downloads. Too bad not all of the games I have seem to have findable covers.
I’ll be keeping both on my device.
FTR: Nook Color with N2A CM7 SD, booted into CM7.
Running a Droid X on DSX, Hunky Punk doesn’t work. The scrolling is broken, so the keyboard covers the text. Also typing after a couple of minutes leads to long strings of seemingly random text into the parser like it’s duplicating something. I saw the same behavior running stock Froyo and stock GB. Twisty works great, but if you want to change games, it has to scan your entire SD card for games. Hunky Punk creates an Interactive Fiction folder and only loads games stored there.
I’ll be keeping HunkyPunk on my HTC Desire phone in the hope that it will receive an update one day but at present it doesn’t work at all on this device.
Rob
Aw, sorry. My best guess about what’s going on here: Savoir-Faire uses some space-saving tricks that aren’t commonly seen in recent Inform games, and though those are within spec, it may be that those interpreters encounter such techniques so seldom that they haven’t been debugged for them. For instance, Savoir-Faire is abbreviating a lot of common words and sub-word sections – the code file starts out with a bunch of lines like this:
Abbreviate " the ";
Abbreviate "The ";
Abbreviate "ing ";
Abbreviate " you";
Abbreviate "You";
Abbreviate "magic";
…and goes on like that for quite a while. Maybe these interpreters either can’t handle the abbreviations or are swapping them in wrong.
(Not that that necessarily helps you much, but it might be a place to look if someone is trying to debug this.)