What are the options, if any, for setting up a web page where visitors can play a Z-code version 6 game on a web page, preferably with sound support too?
Infocom Frotz was created specifically for the purpose of bringing Infocom’s Z6 games to the web. I don’t know how well it’d work for new works outside of that set.
I never got around to adding a play anything page like Parchment has, but you could easily reuse the Infocom Frotz files to put on another site. You just specify the z6 or zblorb file in the HTML.
I just tried Parchment on one of my games and was told “Error: Unsupported Z-Machine version: 6”. I’m probably using an old version of Parchment from a couple of years ago. This version works fine with the same game compiled to gblorb, albeit without sound. Is there a newer version with Z6 support?
I have a web interpreter for Z6 supporting sound and images. If you have a specific Z6 game in mind, i could try it and let you know.
Bocfel now has some minimal support for Z6 so Parchment could at least run it. I have to update it so it doesn’t think it can’t run .z6 files. It would probably already run a .zblorb containing a Z6 storyfile.
For now, I was thinking of running Wyrmward by Johan Berntsson , which has both images and sound.
I hackily scraped material off Dannii’s Infocom Frotz deployment and adapted it by hand for Wyrmward. Seems to work, superficially; I experience both graphics and sound. I didn’t have to do anything beyond what seemed obvious.
Temporary playable page, and directory listing so you can see the moving parts.
Caveats: (a) this is a temporary link as proof of concept, which may go away at any time; (b) the web server it’s on is currently slow and unreliable[1], so you might have to refresh several times before it works.
(suffering from the same chronic distributed bot scraper DDoS as the rest of the open web) ↩︎
Lanthorn (GitHub - sharkusk/lanthorn · GitHub) ships with a docker image that allows you to play all of the z6 games (along with other z-machine and glulx games) through a browser window.
Thanks @JTN ! I have copied the files, and have it running on my server now.