Downloads

Ready-built copies of the Zaytun compiler and the terminal player, version 1.1.0 — built from the v1.1.0 tags of the two repositories. Every archive holds both programs, the language guide and the licence, and nothing else — there is no installer and nothing to configure.

You do not need any of this to play the games in a browser. You need it to compile a game of your own, or to play one in a terminal.

What changed in 1.1.0 is a page of its own. If you already have 1.0.0, read it before you upgrade: a game compiled by 1.0.0 will not play on this release, and recompiling it from source is the whole of the fix.

Choose your platform

Download Zaytun for Linux, 64-bit x86: Most desktop and server Linux. If you are not sure, this is the one.
zaytun-1.1.0-linux64.tar.gz · 355 KB · SHA-256 44d58199d2932a36…
Download Zaytun for Linux, 32-bit x86: Older 32-bit x86 machines.
zaytun-1.1.0-linux32.tar.gz · 370 KB · SHA-256 594f2da70d25e2f6…
Download Zaytun for Linux, 64-bit ARM: Raspberry Pi 3 and later on a 64-bit system, and ARM servers.
zaytun-1.1.0-arm64.tar.gz · 346 KB · SHA-256 d19c1ec81e1714e8…
Download Zaytun for Linux, 32-bit ARM: Raspberry Pi on a 32-bit system, and older ARM boards. Hard-float.
zaytun-1.1.0-arm32.tar.gz · 328 KB · SHA-256 dd37b60533591da8…
Download Zaytun for Windows, 64-bit: Windows 7 and later on a 64-bit system.
zaytun-1.1.0-win64.zip · 564 KB · SHA-256 c69b34469674eb4d…
Download Zaytun for Windows, 32-bit: 32-bit Windows, and anything where the 64-bit build will not run.
zaytun-1.1.0-win32.zip · 565 KB · SHA-256 c558a3e7398de9bd…
Download Zaytun for FreeBSD, 64-bit x86: Built on FreeBSD 15.1, not cross-compiled.
zaytun-1.1.0-freebsd64.tar.gz · 364 KB · SHA-256 c538b37c7af58e74…
Download Zaytun for FreeBSD, 64-bit ARM: Cross-compiled on FreeBSD against the 15.1 arm64 base, and tested on a Raspberry Pi.
zaytun-1.1.0-freebsdarm64.tar.gz · 345 KB · SHA-256 2bf2aaca377ffd7b…

What is in the archive

zaytunc — the compiler. zaytunc mygame.zaytun writes mygame.zaytunb.
zaytunplay — the terminal player. zaytunplay mygame.zaytunb.
HANDBOOK.md — the complete language guide and reference.
LICENSE — the GNU General Public License, version 3.

Unpack it anywhere. Both programs are single files with no dependencies beyond the system C library, so you can put them on your PATH or run them from where they are.

Unpacking and running, on Linux.

tar xzf zaytun-linux64.tar.gz
cd zaytun-linux64
./zaytunc mygame.zaytun
./zaytunplay mygame.zaytunb

Editor support

Somebody who has just unpacked the toolchain is exactly the person who wants their editor to know what a .zaytun file is. There are three — VS Code, Emacs, and Vim with Neovim — all maintained here, and the editor support page has what each one does, how to install it without a plugin manager, and which of them checks its word list against the compiler.

Checking what you downloaded

Every archive is published with its SHA-256 beside it, in a SHA256SUMS file alongside the downloads, and this page prints the first sixteen characters of each so the two can be compared without downloading anything twice.

Checking an archive against the published sums.

sha256sum -c SHA256SUMS

Building it yourself instead

These binaries are built from the same source you can clone, with no patches. The whole toolchain needs a C compiler and nothing else, and zaytunc and zaytunplay both build with make — GNU make and BSD make alike, so on FreeBSD you can use either make or gmake.

Each also has a make cross that builds every binary the machine you are on can honestly produce. From Linux that is the six Linux and Windows builds; on FreeBSD it is the FreeBSD one, and the FreeBSD ARM build with FREEBSD_ARM64_SYSROOT= pointed at an unpacked arm64 base tree. It will not label a binary with a platform it was not built for, so running it on both machines is what produces the full set on this page.

A note on what is tested

Every binary here was built from the v1.1.0 tags and run before it was published: all eight compilers produced byte-identical bytecode for the same game, and each player then played that bytecode. A saved game written by the 32-bit ARM build was restored by the 64-bit x86 one, and a saved game written on FreeBSD was restored on Linux, so a save is not tied to the machine that made it.

Every build but the two for Windows has been run on real hardware. The x86 Linux and FreeBSD ones were built and run on their own machines — the FreeBSD builds on a FreeBSD 15.1 system, not cross-compiled — and the ARM builds, both the Linux ones and the FreeBSD one, were tested on a Raspberry Pi. The Windows builds are the exception: they are cross-compiled and were exercised under Wine, which is not the same as running on Windows. If one of them misbehaves for you, that is worth reporting rather than working around.