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Microsoft makes Zork open-source

opensource.microsoft.com

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Re: Microsoft makes Zork open-source

#111

Post by bryanlarsen »

reticulated wrote: post #90
drob518 wrote: post #77

When I was 14 or so, in the early 1980s, a friend and I who had been playing Zork thought it would be fun to design a game ourselves. We actually wrote to Infocom with a proposal that we write a new game for them and they let us use ZIL and the Z-machine to implement it. Surprisingly, they actually wrote back to us and politely declined our offer. In hindsight, while we knew how to program in BASIC and assembly langu…

My goodness, I could have written this word-for-word. Similar age, same Apple II BASIC and 6502 upbringing (roll sleeves and call -151 ) and also wrote to Infocom. We were in the UK so even more surprised to get a reply similar to yours several weeks later. Sadly my letter is also lost to various house moves. Or eaten by a grue.

Me too, except my letter was to Sierra On-Line and my experience was on TRS-80 6809. Really classy reply asking me to write back when I finished school.

Re: Microsoft makes Zork open-source

#112

Post by VikingCoder »

The thing I want is probably very stupid -

I'd like Zork I through III ported to Inform 6...

I don't specifically know why that appeals to me. I guess it's because I'd like to tinker with it and understand it better. And if I were going to write Zork I from scratch today, I'd want to use the most modern tools available. [checks notes] Okay, but not Inform 7. I have an aversion to Inform 7. I want my code to look more like code, and less like an LLM prompt.

Re: Microsoft makes Zork open-source

#113

Post by tshaddox »

entropicdrifter wrote: post #65
randall wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

whoa til microsoft owns blizzard.

You're one of today's lucky 10,000. It was huge news at the time. The FTC considered not allowing it and the acquisition got delayed for months while back and forth public debate raged.

Massive media/telecom/tech companies get passed around between other massive media/telecom/tech companies so much that regardless of how much you saw the news at the time, a couple of years later it's tough to remember "Now who is it that owns Warner Bros. currently? AOL? AT&T? Netflix? The sovereign wealth fund of Saudi Arabia?"

Re: Microsoft makes Zork open-source

#116

Post by johnisgood »

ErroneousBosh wrote: post #107
johnisgood wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yup, they will care when a huge % of people start doing it.

Not really, no. No-one buys Windows. No-one buys Office. It's a thing that comes bundled with a computer, or that you "acquire" if you need it. It's only interesting if Barclays are pirating Windows on a massive scale. Oh shit did I say the name out loud?

Do companies really not buy licenses?

Re: Microsoft makes Zork open-source

#117

Post by lencastre »

Gormo wrote: post #94
randall wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

whoa til microsoft owns blizzard.

And Sierra. It would be amazing if MS released the source code to some of Sierra classic Hi-Res/AGI/SCI games, or the engines themselves. IIRC, Al Lowe had retained copies of source code from the early Sierra days, and was planning to release some of it publicly a few years ago, but Activision shut him down. Maybe MS would be willing to reconsider that now that they're pursuing historical preservation.

Space Quest IV!!!

Re: Microsoft makes Zork open-source

#118

Post by bernds74 »

sigmonsays wrote: post #76

bummer > The code relies on old internal Infocom toolchains (ZILCH compiler, WATFOR, > mainframe environment) that are not open and likely not preserved.

There's this: https://www.ifwiki.org/ZILF https://zilf.io/

Although I haven't played with it and can't tell you whether it can compile the open source Zork.

Re: Microsoft makes Zork open-source

#119

Post by chihuahua »

drob518 wrote: post #77

When I was 14 or so, in the early 1980s, a friend and I who had been playing Zork thought it would be fun to design a game ourselves. We actually wrote to Infocom with a proposal that we write a new game for them and they let us use ZIL and the Z-machine to implement it. Surprisingly, they actually wrote back to us and politely declined our offer. In hindsight, while we knew how to program in BASIC and assembly langu…

In the 1980s, I was interested in text adventure games, and had a kind of book/magazine on the topic of how to write them. In BASIC, obviously (groan) because that's what was easily accessible back then.

I remember figuring out the mechanisms that the book introduced: what kind of rudimentary data structures to use to represent the state of the world, the locations of objects, etc.

I got some simple stuff to work, you could navigate the world, pick up and drop objects, etc. but then my motivation gradually ran out because I didn't have a clearly defined design for the game I was going to build.

I had a few pirated games (C64, Amiga): "Death in the Caribbean", "The Pawn", etc but never had the motivation to stick with them past the first or second puzzle. The puzzles seemed like if the answer didn't arrive via a flash of divine inspiration, there was no way to figure it out based on logical reasoning. Maybe that part of my brain wasn't developed back then.

Re: Microsoft makes Zork open-source

#120

Post by ErroneousBosh »

johnisgood wrote: post #116
ErroneousBosh wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not really, no. No-one buys Windows. No-one buys Office. It's a thing that comes bundled with a computer, or that you "acquire" if you need it. It's only interesting if Barclays are pirating Windows on a massive scale. Oh shit did I say the name out loud?

Do companies really not buy licenses?

Reputable ones do.
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