Given the emormous number of MUD clients in existence today, we at ElvenRunes.com felt compelled to try and help MUME players pick just the right client to suit their gaming needs. What follows is just such a guide.

The intention of this guide is not to compare all MUD clients, but to try and rate those that are tailored specifically to MUME's needs as well as those used by a measurable percentage of the MUME population.

If there are any features or definitions below that you do not understand, check out the MUD Client FAQ.

Is any of the information on this page incorrect or out of date? Do you disagree with a rating or feel that your MUD client was left out? Let us know by sending an email to feedback@elvenrunes.com.

• Website: http://www.elvenrunes.com/PowTTY
• Author: Bill Johnston (aka Loden)
• Version: 1.01
• Cost: Free
• Supported OS: Win98, WinNT, Win2k
• File Size: 256k (low memory usage)
• Speed: Fast
• Last Update: 2001-June-11
• Description: A fusion of two highly popular telnet applications, PuTTY and Powwow, PowTTY offers the best of both worlds. An extremely fast telnet client, with a compact graphical user interface for user settings.
• Strengths:
  • Supports aliasing, logging, looping, speedwalking, triggers.
  • Supports limited keybinding:
    F1-F12, shift F1-F12, Keypad 0-9/*-+, Keypad Enter, PgUp/PgDn
  • Implementation of MUME remote editing protocol.
  • Compact menu-driven client settings, which do not impede speed performance.
  • Supports both UNIX/PC Powwow scripts.
• Weaknesses:
  • No tab completion or directed output display. However, expect future releases to support this feature.
  • Does not run under Win95.
  • Still a few sporadic bugs crop up from time to time, normally resulting in a bad line redraw. Have yet to see it crash.
• Conclusion: PowTTY is only in its infancy and already it surpases many of the other PC MUD clients in circulation. The program author is also quite active and users can expect to see regular updates. I fully expect PowTTY to be the UNIX Powwow equivalent for the PC.

• Link: http://www.zuggsoft.com
• Author: Mike Potter
• Version: 6.16
• Cost: $25 US (future upgrades free)
• Supported OS: Win95, Win98, WinNT, Win2k
• File Size: 6M (high memory usage)
• Speed: Slow
• Last Update: 2001-March-03
• Description: zMUD is a very popular MUD telnet client for Windows. It is a very UI intensive application, providing menu screens for just about everything. This allows for the creation of some rather complex functionality. zMud also has several very unique features: an equipment database and a map generator.
  NOTE: There is still a free, unsupported version - zMud 3.62. It is a 16-bit application and does not work on Win2k OS. It has most of the inherent drawbacks of the newer versions, yet with more bugs and no support. Thus I would not recommend using it.
• Strengths:
  • Supports aliasing, triggers, logging, keybinding, looping, speedwalking.
  • Directed output dispay.
  • Split level scrollback.
  • Automatic map generator. Although somewhat complex to learn, once understood, can be very useful for easily mapping zones.
  • ANSI (color) logging available as well.
  • Text to speech feature. Listen to the text output of your favorite MUD reverberate through your speakers! (available as a free plug-in)
• Weaknesses:
  • No support for MUME's remote editing protocol. Although it does come with its own editor which gives it a slight advantage over other similar clients.
  • No support for tab completion.
  • Play is Slow and Sluggish. While it does provide a nice clean interface for allowing less-knowledeable users to perform complex operations, this does not come without a pricetag - speed.
  • Memory hog. If RAM or harddrive space is of any concern to you, zMud can stifle your ability to maneuver about your PC applications.
• Conclusion: If you want to hang with the big boys and do complex aliasing , triggers, and the like but don't understand all the #alias and #trigger commands, then zMud is the application for you! However down the road, if you find yourself complaining about how slow everything is...

• Link: http://www.elvenrunes.com/download/clients/jmc
• Author: Sergey Ilyin
• Version: 3.26
• Cost: Free
• Supported OS: Win95, Win98, WinNT, Win2k
• File Size: 880k (low memory usage)
• Speed: Fast
• Last Update: 2001-March-23
• Description: JMC is a really fast and powerful MUD client. The application is designed around the concept of having the text drawing and scrolling of your client as fast as possible. It also includes a macro language is very powerful and allows you to create some very complex macros using todays standard scripting languages such as JScript and VBScript.
  
• Strengths:
  • Supports aliasing, triggers, logging, keybinding, looping, speedwalking.
  • Includes a RMA player which attempts to provide a simulated real-time playback of logs. (Still buggy, but a nifty feature.)
  • ANSI logging, meaning logs played back through RMA are the colors you view them in your client.
• Weaknesses:
  • No support for MUME's remote editing protocol.
  • No tab completion.
  • Current version still has a few annoying bugs to be worked out.
• Conclusion: Overall a nice MUD client for mortals. However it leaves alot to be desired from an ainur perspective. The overall design of JMC is not very user-friendly either and leaves alot to be desired. In the end, I would only recommend JMC for those who are consumed by client speed and the RMA logging feature.

• Link: http://www.elvenrunes.com/powtty/cancan95.html
• Author: Bjorn Wesen
• Version: 0.8
• Cost: Free
• Supported OS: Win95, WinNT
• File Size: 76k (low memory usage)
• Speed: Fast
• Last Update: 1998-July-15
• Description: Cancan95 is a MUD client written for Windows 95 and NT that runs in a console, which means it can be zoomed up to full-screen DOS mode using <alt+return>. Cancan95 is an extension of powwow0.8 which is an extension of an older version of cancan, which was in itself inspired by Tintin. Confusing eh?
  
• Strengths:
  • Supports aliasing, keybinding, logging, looping, triggers.
  • Implementation of MUME remote editing protocol.
• Weaknesses:
  • No support for speedwalking, tab completion.
  • Does not work in Win98SE (Second Edition) or Win2k.
  • Absolutely no UI configuration to speak of.
  • Cannot view the Latin-1 characterset, ASCII only.
  • Appears to be unsupported, so don't expect any new releases.
• Conclusion: Although Cancan95 is an extemely fast Windows console application, it only works in Win95, Win98 (Early/First edition) and WinNT. There will also be no new releases in the future which support Win2k. Thus I would only recommend Cancan95 to someone who is absolutely stuck using an older Windows OS.

• Link: http://axel.trocha.com/powwow/
• Author of the Windows Port: Axel Trocha (aka Axel)
• Version: 1.2.5
• Cost: Free
• Supported OS: Win95, Win98, WinNT, Win2k
• File Size: 2MB (low memory usage)
• Speed: Medium
• Last Update: 2001-May-16
• Description: Much like the UNIX version of Powwow 1.2.5, only compiled using cygwin instead of native Win32 libraries. This version of Powwow started out as a way for the program author to mimic his UNIX environment on the PC.
• Strengths:
  • Supports aliasing, keybinding, logging, looping, speedwalking, tab completion, triggers?
  • Directed output dispay.
  • Implementation of MUME remote editing protocol.
• Weaknesses:
  • Unsupported, expect no new releases.
  • Compiled using cygwin, which slows down application speed.
  • Still some bugs and problems that need to be worked out.
• Conclusion: Since this is not a true port of Powwow to a Win32 environment, that is is relies on cygwin, it falls sort of a great MUD client. I would only recommend this version of Powwow to those who use UNIX almost exclusively and perhaps use a PC on rare occassions. In that circumstannce it might be nice to not have to learn a new client, however I would not recommend PK.

• Link: http://www.wintin.org/
• Author: William Lees
• Version: 1.73
• Cost: Free
• Supported OS: Win95, Win98, WinNT, Win2k
• File Size: 560k (low memory usage)
• Speed: Fast
• Last Update: 2000-March-06
• Description: Wintin (or as it has been renamed, Wintin95) is a Windows port of Tintin++, the The kIckiN Tickin dIkumud clieNt. The port was made into a WindowsNT console application, which helps keep the speed of its UNIX Tintin++ predessor.
  
• Strengths:
  • Supports aliasing, keybinding, logging, looping, speedwalking, tab completion, triggers.
  • Directed output dispay. (Allows up to 7 concurrent windows.)
• Weaknesses:
  • No support for MUME's remote editing protocol.
  • UI rather limited and not very configurable.
  • There are still a number of bugs, including unexplained crashes and UI problems.
  • Appears to be unsupported, so don't expect any new releases.
• Conclussion: Wintin95 is a good port of Tintin++. However, there are many more superior MUD clients in existence and I would only recommend this client to those who are firmly entrenched in UNIX Tintin++ and wish to only ocassionally use a PC client.

• Link: http://www.druware.com/tf/
• Author: Ken Keys (Andy Satori - Win32)
• Version: 4.0
• Cost: Free
• Supported OS: Win95, Win98, WinNT, Win2k
• File Size: 1.1MB (low memory usage)
• Speed: Medium
• Last Update: 2000-Jan-13
• Description: A very flexible, highly configurable screen-oriented client. However it is extremely difficult to learn and completely incompatible with other MUD client scripts.
  
• Strengths:
  • Support for aliasing, keybinding, logging, looping, triggers.
  • Advanced programming support.
• Weaknesses:
  • No support for speedwalking, tab completion.
  • No support for MUME's remote editing protocol.
  • Only available via a cygwin compile, which means it is slower than a native Win32 client.
  • Difficult to learn.
  • Appears to be unsupported, so don't expect any new releases.
• Conclussion: I'd rather use raw telnet, its faster and more intuitive. While the programming capabilities is awesome (if you can figure it out), it certainly doesn't make up for the terrible display and slow speed due to cygwin compiling.

• Link: http://www.rhudaur.com/cs/
• Author: Lars Frode Hansen (aka Terilaen)
• Version: 2.1
• Cost: Free
• Supported OS: Win95, Win98, WinNT, Win2k
• File Size: 312k (low memoryage usage)
• Speed: Fast
• Last Update: 2001-April-20
• Description:
  
• Strengths:
  • Implementation of MUME remote editing protocol, I couldn't make it work though.
• Weaknesses:
  • Program bugs everywhere.
  • Many unimplemented features.
• Conclusion: CS (or CS2 as it is now known) is not an official release, since it is still in an alpha stage. Not suprisingly it has tons of bugs and unimplemented features which make this client virtually unusable. If the bugs and features are eventually worked out, it could easily move up the list.

• Link: http://Linuz.sns.it/~max/powwow/
          http://linuz.sns.it/~max/powwow/powwow-1.2.5.tar.gz
          (Cosmos forgot to link download to main site)
• Author: Massimiliano Ghilardi (aka Cosmos)
• Version: 1.2.5
• Cost: Free
• Supported OS: UNIX/Linux
• File Size: 127k
• Speed: Fast
• Last Update: 2000-May-04
• Description: Powwow is a client program, which replaces telnet for the MUD players that want some extra features. It is primarily designed for DikuMUDs, but nothing prevents its use for other types of MUDs. It was based on early versions of UNIX Cancan.
• Strengths:
  • Supports aliasing, keybinding, logging, looping, speedwalking, tab completion, triggers.
  • Directed output dispay.
  • Implementation of MUME remote editing protocol.
• Weaknesses:
  • None come to mind...
• Conclusion: Powwow is essentially the perfect MUME MUD client. Why would anyone use anything else?

Tiny Fugue      Mortal: ?     Ainur: ?

• Link: http://www.druware.com/tf/
• Cost: Free
• Supported OS: Unix
• Strengths:
  • Support for aliasing, keybinding, logging (ANSI or not), looping, triggers, speedwalking, tab completion. 
  • Powerful scripting.
  • Regular expressions support in triggers and string manipulation.
• Weaknesses:
  • No support for MUME remote editing support (can be emulated by scripting, far from perfect though).
  • Difficult to learn.
• Conclussion: While I tried to be objective in the pros and cons, it is less easy to do so here. The scripting capacities are awesome (I've still to find a built in/script for another client that I couldn't rewrite for tf), however the language itself is not really intuitive. - Review By Waba.
• Notes:
  • I did not compared to the other clients, so I can only complete the strength and weaknesses fields, as long as giving some hints for the conclusion. 
  • While most info should be the same as the win32 version, not compiling with cygwin removes the speed problem (although I can't tell, being on a decent computer..) 
  • The tf/win32 review seems to have some "overlooking" problems, so it may need to be corrected too (for example, speedwalking and tab completion are available as soon as you load the related script).
  • Even if the mailing list traffic is low, the releases pretty far, tf is supported and developed AFAICT.  

• Link: http://www.rapscallion.co.uk/
• Author: Pure Software Ltd
• Version: 2.0.2
• Cost: $25
• Supported OS: Mac OS 8.x and greater
• File Size: ?
• Speed: Slow
• Last Update: 1998-October-18
• Description: Rapscallion is a highly diverse telnet application offering most of the features players demand of their MUD client.
• Strengths:
  • Supports aliasing, keybinding, logging, looping, speedwalking, tab completion, triggers.
  • Directed output dispay.
  • Split-window scrollback.
  • Speedwalking feature has the ability for speed adjustment between moves.
  • Text to speech feature. Listen to the text output of your favorite MUD reverberate through your speakers!
• Weaknesses:
  • No support for MUME's remote editing protocol.
• Conclusion: Rapscallion is hands-down the best Mac MUD client in existence.