The interface is heavily (well, completely) based on ATK, an X toolkit
developed at CMU. Really, I would have preferred to actually do this in
ATK except that then you'd need ATK to run it, and that's 50
*megabytes*
of source code. (Honest.) So I just did an imitation

Here is a screen shot of
*XZip* (monochrome GIF image, 11K)

It is running Graham Nelson's excellent text game
*Curses!* (also freeware, but not distributed by me.) Note the scroll bar, full-justified text, boldface, full mouse and keyboard text editing, and Emacs-style key bindings. (Ok, the Emacs keys are harder to see.) On a color display, you can also customize the window and text colors

The Z-code engine in
*XZip* is taken from ZIP V2.0.7
by Mark Howell ([email protected])

You can download the source code. It's a tarred, compressed file, about 136K. It should build easily on any Unix platform with X windows (including Linux.)
John Elliott ([email protected]) has provided a source code patch which adds support for the Beyond Zork graphical font. The patch includes a BDF font file

If you like the XZip interface, you may also be interested in MaxZip, a similar interpreter I wrote for the Macintosh. There's also MaxTADS, an interpreter for playing TADS game files on the Macintosh

Here is the directory of Z-code games in the IF Archive

I myself have written several games in Z-code format. People seem to think that some of them are pretty good

*Zarf IF*
*Zarfhome*
*(map)*
*(down)*