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Microsoft makes Zork open-source

opensource.microsoft.com

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Re: Microsoft makes Zork open-source

#151

Post by WorldMaker »

skissane wrote: post #57
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…

> 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. Likely explanation: their lawyers are worried there may be third party rights or agreements limiting their ability to open source a game – even if that isn't true, lawyers want to see paperwork to convince themselves it isn't true. For Zork, that was comparatively easy bec…

Yeah, they probably started with what was easiest/oldest/most iconic with the clearest copyright history/ownership record.

In at least one of the above mentioned cases, we do know that the current rights holder and/or most recent licensee appears to be the BBC: https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/articles/1g84m0sXpnNCv84GpN...

The BBC probably has a say in if that game will be open source. (Their multi-decade effort at making the game free to play and being open about some of their enhancements to it suggests they may be willing to help with that, and Microsoft making the first move with Zork 1/2/3 may help with any interest there.)

Re: Microsoft makes Zork open-source

#153

Post by WorldMaker »

flyinghamster wrote: post #47
classichasclass wrote: post #26

It's not just Zork: a number of games, including Hitchhiker's, are open source now. https://github.com/historicalsource

I'd wonder if Hitchhiker's would have some issues with Douglas Adams' estate, given his involvement.

I believe his estate ceded the Infocom game to the BBC who have been keeping the game up (free to play) for more than a decade now: https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/articles/1g84m0sXpnNCv84GpN...

Re: Microsoft makes Zork open-source

#154

Post by ndiddy »

chihuahua wrote: post #122
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.

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 configur…

People have built working operating systems from both the XP/Server 2003 and NT 4 leaks. Here's someone building Server 2003 on Windows 11: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AWZe00v2Rs0

Re: Microsoft makes Zork open-source

#155

Post by WorldMaker »

classichasclass wrote: post #26

It's not just Zork: a number of games, including Hitchhiker's, are open source now. https://github.com/historicalsource

The notable change is that most of those repos have been available not as a open source but "source available" as Fair Use (for Archival Purposes), but the copyright owner (Microsoft today) has now directly applied the MIT License to three of those repos (Zork 1/2/3). Hopefully they will apply it to more of them as Microsoft legal allows, but it's still exciting they've made three repos officially open source under a FLOSS recognized license.

Re: Microsoft makes Zork open-source

#156

Post by eej71 »

bryanlarsen wrote: post #111
reticulated wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I recall sending a letter to them asking them for information on how they compressed their images for their hi-res adventure games. While they replied, they said it was a trade secret. I was kind of bummed. But being a 12 year old kid who barely understood the 6502, it probably would have gone over my head.

Re: Microsoft makes Zork open-source

#157

Post by WillAdams »

leoc wrote: post #73
katspaugh wrote: post #14

So Zork was written in Lisp? It had to be! --- >

From one perspective ADVENT is just SHRDLU turned inside out, after all. (Though of course from another perspective it's a fancier WUMPUS.) ('ADVENT' is https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colossal_Cave_Adventure , for anyone who isn't familar.)

A nice overview of the source code for that is:

http://literateprogramming.com/adventure.pdf

Re: Microsoft makes Zork open-source

#158

Post by DonHopkins »

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.

I wrote them, and after a while I received a brochure in my mailbox, with this stamp:

    ---v----v----v----v----v---
    |         _______         |
    >  One   /       \     G   Point |   ___   |    E             P        / /       \ \   s       | |  \ _ /  | |  a       | |  /| |\  | |  e        \ \__/_\__/ /            |  f.m.l.c. |                                    Spelunker Today
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23114927

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A8Z1cKUxD9c

https://crpgadventures.blogspot.com/2016/05/zork-victory-sor...

Re: Microsoft makes Zork open-source

#159

Post by ndiddy »

PilotJeff wrote: post #87

I would love to see the Apple ][ source code made available for a lot of these classic games. In this case what I really want to see is the Z-Engine or interpreter itself not essentially the data files only.

The source code for most of Infocom's Z-code interpreters (including the Apple version) is available here: https://github.com/erkyrath/infocom-zcode-terps . Note that this isn't an official licensed release so it's in a legal gray area. It would be nice to see Microsoft bless these with an official license as well.

Re: Microsoft makes Zork open-source

#160

Post by WorldMaker »

drob518 wrote: post #125
chihuahua wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 wi…

Writing a terrible "verb object" parser in BASIC was certainly a rite of passage for many of us. I recall making more than one. I also recall my best one having rudimentary "verb object preposition subject" support, but that being about my limit at the time in BASIC.

But also I had access to TADS and early Inform (at home) and still wound up building a couple in BASIC (because school computer labs would have that available).

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