Expanding Zinc
Zinc is designed to be expandible with plugins - downloadable modules that can be loaded into Zinc and which expand the functionality of Zinc. Zinc plugins fall into three main categories:
Virtual machine plugins allow Zinc to play different game file types. Zinc comes with two virtual machine plugins. The Z-machine interpreter allows you to play Infocom Z-machine adventure games, and the Jetty interpreter allows you to play TADS 2 games.
Display plugins provide the user interface for games. Zinc comes with a basic text console plugin which is used by the Z-machine and Jetty interpreters.
Miscellaneous plugins add functionality to Zinc in other ways.
The Plugin Manager
The plugin manager dialog box allows you to load and unload plugins. It is opened from the Game Launcher window by selecting File->Plugins....
The currently loaded plugins are listed. You can unload a plugin by selecting it and clicking the Unload button. Note that you cannot unload one of Zinc's core plugins (The Z-machine, Jetty and the basic text console).
You can load a plugin by clicking the Load... button. Zinc plugin files have a .znp file extension.