On Mon, 24 Jun 2013 14:28:01 +0200, Christian Kellermann
Post by Christian KellermannI am looking for an (preferably) open source interpreter for my favorite
story files for android. As I will be playing this on a so called
"phone" screen estate is expensive and I won't be using a lot of a
keyboard.
Any recommendations? What are your experiences?
I haven't seen any Glulx terps for Android, but there are several z-code
terps out there - the ones I have installed are Twisty, Hunky Punk, ZMPP
Free, and JFrotz.
Twisty is a good basic terp; it doesn't handle graphics (e.g., Zork
Zero), and it searches your device for story files. Story files are
sorted in "ASCIIbetical" order (i.e., files that start with capital
letters all sort before those that start with lowercase letters). They
may be stored anywhere on your device's sdcard; the terp searches each
time it is invoked. It recognizes the haptic sensor, and will
automatically re-orient from portrait to landscape.
ZMPP Free doesn't recognize the haptic sensor, but does have a setting
to start it in landscape mode (ostensibly to allow the use of a hardware
keyboard [e.g., bluetooth]), and supports voice input if available on
the device. It also allows you to change the color and text size, and
has an option to enable suggestions for text input (e.g., if you type
"lo", you'll see suggestions above the keyboard, one of which will be
"look"). It also support clear display of bold and italic, which Twisty
doesn't. ZMPP can also download stories from IFDB, if you've got an
active network connection on your device. It requires stories to be
stored in a specific directory on your device. ZMPP supports .zblorb
files, as well as all .z(n) formats (except .z6). The library is sorted
in alphabetical order, not ignoring words such as "the".
Hunky Punk is comparable to ZMPP. It recognizes the haptic sensor and
will autorotate, but does not support input siggestions, voice input, or
direct downloading from IFDB. When reading stories from the library, it
will display the "box art" and bibliographic information if it's
available. The library is sorted in alphabetical order, not ignoring
words such as "the".
JFrotz's library handling is the most flexible, but the most
user-unfriendly. You actually must navigate the file system to the story
file you want to load, which is displayed by file name. Sorting is
alphabetical, not ignoring words such as "the". There is a customized
"keyboard" available, called the "ZBoard", that contains single-tap
buttons for common commands, a basic alpha keyboard, and a
numeric/symbol keyboard. The text resizing and color changing appears
not to work on all devices; I tested on a Nook HD+ with the Jellybean
N2A card installed.