This article will help you find interpreters for MacOS Classic. After reading this guide you should be able to make a complete collection of interpreters for all of the major text adventure languages. Note that I won't be describing the different languages and virtual machines that are out there; if you don't know why you'd want a z-machine interpreter, you should read my article on the various interpreters first. Similarly, I won't tell you what the Interactive Fiction Archive is; if you don't know, read this guide to the IF Archive first.

What about MacOS X? Native OS X interpreters are still a little hard to come by. Z-code interpreters are available as native applications, and the Classic apps can still be run in Classic mode. If you'd prefer, you can compile the Unix interpreters yourself if you really don't want to run any interpreters in Classic mode.

As I've said before, writing instructions for downloading and installing interpreters is akin to trying to nail jelly to an air mattress. This guide will no doubt be out-of-date in short order. If you've found an error in this guide or if some of it is now out of date, drop me a line.

I need to talk a moment about packaging. Most Mac interpreters come in StuffIt files, which are recognizable by their .sit extension. You'll need a program to uncompress StuffIt files. Aladdin Systems are the makers of StuffIt; you can download their free StuffIt Expander to deal with StuffIt files. When you download a StuffIt file, run it through StuffIt Expander (assuming your browser doesn't do that for you). Once you've done that you will have either a single application or a folder, either of which you can move to wherever you want on your hard drive. After that you can throw away the StuffIt file.

There are some OS X interpreters which come as disk images, recognizable by their extension .dmg. Occasionally they are gzipped as well, in which case the file ends in .dmg.gz. The nice thing about disk images is that you can mount them by double-clicking on them, making them behave just like a removable disk. Once you've done that, you can open the image and copy files wherever you want them.

Some files you'll download will be in MacBinary format, and end in .bin. StuffIt Expander should handle those just fine.

But wait! There's more! Some files you'll be downloading are BinHexed, and carry the extension .hqx. And as with the other types of files, you'll need to let StuffIt Expander decode BinHexed files for you. Don't be surprised to see StuffIt BinHexed files (.sit.hqx) and Stuffit MacBinary files (.sit.bin). The solution to them all is to run them through StuffIt Expander, the Swiss army knife of Mac uncompression tools.

Finally, if all you're looking for is links to the latest interpreters, you should skip ahead to the last page.