Reviving a dead audio format: the return of ZZM

Long-time readers will know that my first video game love was the text-mode video game slash creation studio ZZT. One feature of this game is the ability to play simple music through the PC speaker, and back in the day, I remember that the format “ZZM” existed, so you could enjoy the square wave tunes outside of the games. But imagine my surprise in 2025 to find that, while the Museum of ZZT does have a ZZM Audio section, it recommends that nobody use the format anymore; because nobody’s made a player that doesn’t require MS-DOS. Let’s fix that by making a player with way higher system requirements, using everyone’s favorite coding environment: Javascript.
↫ Nicole Branagan

ZZM’s history and Branagan’s journey to make this work without having to rely on DOS took a lot more work than I expected, and is quite interesting, too. Very niche, for sure, but that’s kind of what we’re here for.