Click Play, or press any game key.
Keyboard: arrows, X = A, Z = B, Enter = Start. A gamepad works too.
ZZT for the NES Unofficial NES Port
ZZT (1991) is Tim Sweeney's text-mode adventure and game-making system: every board is a grid of
60×25 characters, and its objects run their own little programs. This is ZZT 3.2 rebuilt as a Nintendo
Entertainment System cartridge, running here in your browser: all of Town of ZZT and the ZZT demo
world, every board on one screen in a hand-drawn font of 4×8-pixel characters.
An unofficial port. NES Port by BX Foundry. Your saved game stays in this browser.
How it works, and how it was made →
Click Play, or press any game key.
The game
"Your task is to find the five purple keys that are hidden throughout the Town. These keys unlock the doors leading into the Palace, your destination." Gems keep you alive, ammunition and torches help, and anything unusual is worth touching. There are 33 boards: a forest, a castle, the Mixer, a prison, puzzles, and six dragons. The title menu's Choose world switches to the ZZT demo world, a tour of every item, creature and terrain.
On the NES
- The whole 60×25 board on one screen: two board cells per NES tile, in a font drawn for it.
- ZZT's sidebar becomes a status bar at the bottom.
- An optional soundtrack: three original tracks, for the title, the boards and dark rooms (Music in the menus). ZZT's own sounds and tunes come first.
- Text windows unroll and scroll smoothly (the NES draws them on a second screen and switches between the two partway down the picture).
- Colours are chosen per 4×2 cells, so now and then a cell shows a nearby colour.
- Not ported: the world editor, printing.
Download
The cartridge is a standard MMC3 board (512 KB PRG-ROM, 8 KB CHR-RAM, 8 KB battery RAM, NES 2.0 header): it runs in NES emulators and on MMC3 flash carts. The source is built from Adrian Siekierka's Reconstruction of ZZT (MIT), with cc65 and Python; its README says how to build it.
