Microsoft makes Zork open-source • Hacker News Board

Re: Microsoft makes Zork open-source

#121

Post by drob518 » Thu, Nov 20, 2025, 9:29 PM UTC

jjtheblunt wrote: post #99

drob518 wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m curious why they chose MDL rather than Lisp for it. Sure, it would have been ancient MACLISP or whatever, but why not leverage what was already in wide use at MIT at the time?

maybe they just made a mini-lisp and called it MDL?

It’s very Lispy, but it’s not strictly Lisp. Why, for instance, use “” to surround various forms but not others? If they were to make a mini-Lisp, I’d expect something more like Gnu Emacs Lisp, something that’s obviously a Lisp, but heavily influenced by the Lisps of the day. I’ve found a few old MDL manuals linked from Wikipedia, but none of them have any sort of “Here’s why we created MDL” section that I could find.

Re: Microsoft makes Zork open-source

#122

Post by chihuahua » Thu, Nov 20, 2025, 9:30 PM UTC

jsheard wrote: post #30

ayaros wrote: post #24

This is great, but I'd rather they make Windows 11 open-source instead.

Funnily enough you can easily find the Windows XP source code on GitHub. Not endorsed by Microsoft of course, but they've ignored it sitting on their own service for years, along with ignoring all the modern Windows and Office piracy tools which are also on GitHub. Microsoft works in mysterious ways.

I think it would be safe for Microsoft to release (intentionally or unintentionally) the source for just about any product. I bet it's incredibly difficult to run a successful build. From talking to someone who used to work on Excel, it took them around 1 day to build Excel from source. And that's if everything goes perfectly and you know exactly what you're doing and are using the build system and setup and configuration that the Excel team has in place.

Re: Microsoft makes Zork open-source

#123

Post by boomboomsubban » Thu, Nov 20, 2025, 9:33 PM UTC

When EA recently made Command & Conquer free software, it was clear that the various art assets were not covered under this.

Is there something similar for a text based adventure game? Does the writing count as code?

Re: Microsoft makes Zork open-source

#124

Post by bluGill » Thu, Nov 20, 2025, 9:34 PM UTC

abtinf wrote: post #41

The license says it’s copyright 2025. How does that work? Shouldn’t the copyright be something like 1977?

The copyright on the whole collection is 2025 - which is likely just the README or some such thing. Some of the parts are copyright 1977. For works created after 1978 copyright would last from year of first publication + 90 years, but since most of this is written in/before 1977 different laws apply. (I suspect that Activation was careful to ensure they keep their registration up to date, but there is a slight possibility this is all public domain anyway if you want to hire a lawyer to check)

Re: Microsoft makes Zork open-source

#125

Post by drob518 » Thu, Nov 20, 2025, 9:36 PM UTC

chihuahua wrote: post #119

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, yo…

Nice. Yep, we wrote our own adventure games in BASIC as well. There were a couple problems with that, however. First we weren’t able to come up with a sophisticated parser like Infocom had. We ended up with basic “verb object” parsers, ala Scott Adams adventures. Second, we didn’t have many rooms as it was difficult to fit it all into memory and we didn’t have the sophisticated incremental loading that Infocom did with the Z-machine. Still, it worked.

Re: Microsoft makes Zork open-source

#126

Post by clockworksoul » Thu, Nov 20, 2025, 9:37 PM UTC

MPSimmons wrote: post #86

I like playing Zork via docker: https://github.com/clockworksoul/docker-zork1 > docker run -it clockworksoul/zork1

Somebody uses it! Yay!

You made my day

Re: Microsoft makes Zork open-source

#127

Post by bluGill » Thu, Nov 20, 2025, 9:39 PM UTC

1313ed01 wrote: post #71

ndiddy wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah the code was leaked without Activision's permission a few years ago. It's strange to me that Microsoft has taken this opportunity to clear up the rights to Zork 1-3 but not to the rest of the Infocom back catalog. The other games haven't been available for sale since the mid 90s when Activision put out a shovelware CD collection containing every Infocom game except Hitchhiker's and Shogun, so it's not like they…

I really enjoyed that Activision "shovelware" cd. For a time it made up a large part of my (Linux) game collection. It is not leaving my collection.

I bought a version for the mac (OSX), which I managed to get moved from 800k floppy to my network drive. The games are still on my NAS today and play just fine. Still fun to play, someday I hope to find time to solve them. I keep the originals so should even be legal.

Re: Microsoft makes Zork open-source

#128

Post by npteljes » Thu, Nov 20, 2025, 9:41 PM UTC

ErroneousBosh wrote: post #95

jsheard wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Funnily enough you can easily find the Windows XP source code on GitHub. Not endorsed by Microsoft of course, but they've ignored it sitting on their own service for years, along with ignoring all the modern Windows and Office piracy tools which are also on GitHub. Microsoft works in mysterious ways.

> along with ignoring all the modern Windows and Office piracy tools which are also on GitHub You weren't going to buy it anyway. No-one cares about you. Pirate it if you like. Take your warezed copy of Office Home Edition and be blessed, no-one is going to miss your 120 bucks. An organisation with maybe 100,000 users each paying a per-seat licence? Yeah, that's the sale they want. Not your one-off copy.

They are not this cynical over it, it's part of a plan. What they figure is that they can keep MS the de-facto standard this way. Photoshop worked the same way for very long.

Re: Microsoft makes Zork open-source

#129

Post by BryantD » Thu, Nov 20, 2025, 9:45 PM UTC

The repository is part of https://github.com/historicalsource, which has code for a bunch of Infocom games, although at a quick glance most of them aren't open sourced. Still, very cool resource.

Re: Microsoft makes Zork open-source

#130

Post by dragonwriter » Thu, Nov 20, 2025, 9:46 PM UTC

QuantumNomad_ wrote: post #50

abtinf wrote: post #41

The license says it’s copyright 2025. How does that work? Shouldn’t the copyright be something like 1977?

IANAL but copyright is typically the year of first publication. I could see this being important here in two ways: 1. If the source code of Zork has not been made available to the public before, then now is the year of publication. 2. If Zork source code has previously been made available to the public, perhaps the version published here has had changes made, in which case now is the year of publication of this versi…

> IANAL but copyright is typically the year of first publication.

Under current copyright law, copyright is effective from the moment the work is first set in fixed form, though I think copyright used to be based on first publication.

Updates creates a new work, for which the copyright date is that of the updated work being completed (which doesn't change that some parts are also part of works copyrighted earlier and which may enter the public domain earlier.)