Glancing at my site’s traffic, I noticed that someone hit my site from a Google search on “flash mud client.” Basically, someone was looking to see if there was a way to connect to a MUD using a Flash application. By itself, it seems pretty innocuous, right? I mention MUDs fairly often and I asked about a Flash MUD client in a recent post. No biggie, that’s just how Google works. The interesting part about it is that the UserAgent (the browser used to view the page) is listed as “Opera/9.00 (Nintendo Wii; U; ; 1309-9; en)”. That’s right, someone is using the Opera web browser built into the Nintendo Wii to look for a Flash MUD client.
So, what does that mean? Well, since the Opera browser on the Wii can play Flash games, it means that the Wii could possibly have access to multiplayer RPGs in the form of MUDs. Since there’s no keyboard, I don’t know how feasible a text-based environment would be, but it’s interesting nonetheless.
It also begs the question, “Why doesn’t the XBox 360 have a built-in web browser?” It’s not like Microsoft would have to license one from somebody, they already own IE. They’ve even changed the interface before for the Windows CE…er…Pocket PC…er…Windows Mobile platforms, so why couldn’t they make a nice 10-foot UI? Heck, why don’t they even make a 10-foot UI for their Windows Media Center? That thing is MEANT to be hooked to a TV.
Anyway, I thought it was interesting that someone was looking to play a game that is normally relegated to the desktop on a device that is intended for the living room. It just goes to show you that media is converging and beginning to penetrate everyday life. That said, why hasn’t there been a good couch-based PC input device? You can’t type very well with a remote control, it’s too difficult to use a wireless mouse/keyboard combination, Gyration’s offerings have fallen short, and other offerings are very pricey and have their own quirks.
August 31st, 2007 at 9:40 am
I just got to this post via the very same search, ‘flash mud client’. This is all kind of recursive — searchers finding other searchers. Where are the finders?
P.S. My purpose for wanting this is to put a mud client on my Facebook profile.
December 13th, 2007 at 6:49 am
I also came here looking for the same thing.
But I went on and wrote such a program.
It’s available here:
http://dum.acc.umu.se/~pathor/client2.html
I’ve only started and most likely will only work against DUMII right now, but my intention is that it should work against more muds in the future.
December 13th, 2007 at 10:31 am
That’s very cool Sebastian! I’m not too familiar with the way Flash works, but would that work from behind a firewall? I’m assuming it wouldn’t since the SWF file is downloaded to the local client browser, then connects from there.
Now maybe I can stir up the same response with “ajax mud interface”
In other words, play a specific MUD in a browser (over port 80).
December 14th, 2007 at 10:28 am
Yes, it can not be used to penetrate the firewall.
Its even worse really. The flash player doesn’t allow connections to ports below 1024 unless it first downloads a policy file from port 843, and that is probably most often closed by restrictive firewalls. Otherwise I can imagine cooperative muds would forward port 22 or 443, which is open in a lot more firewalls, to their muds. (I’ve tried to get my sysadmin to forward 443 to DUMII for that reason. 
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I’ve seen somewhere an ajax based telnet client. It used some apache plugin to handle the communication. The latency was pretty bad though and I think it would use a lot of server resources if one has many players.
If some Wii & flash searcher finds this page so must I with regret inform that my flash client will not help, I tried it yesterday. The opera browser on the Wii can only play flash player 7 programs and binary sockets (needed for my mud client) are only available for flash player 9. Opera is blaming Adobe for not making a newer player SDK…