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Microsoft makes Zork open-source

opensource.microsoft.com

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Re: Microsoft makes Zork open-source

#161

Post by anthk »

Gormo wrote: post #100
anthk wrote: post #84

Great, I remember a page which stated that it was sad to have free as in freedom ZMachine languages and interpreters (Inform6, Frotz/Fizmo...) but there were very few text adventures under a libre license. So far, the most known ones: - Spiritwrak - All Things Devour - Calypso - Tristam Island

Perhaps few classic games were released under FOSS licenses, but there are tons of more recent ones on IFDB.

I know, I play IF games since 2001 and 2002; and my previous gameplays where with the classical ones for ZX Spectrum (in Spanish) and some freeware games bundled with 'shareware' CD's with Winfrotz and later Frotz/NFrotz. Some GNU user used to have several under libre licenses (even non-ZMachine ones), such as Beyond the Titanic, but he has no working repos any more.

Re: Microsoft makes Zork open-source

#162

Post by jmward01 »

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…

'as a kid I....' Man. This brings back memories. I got into the BBS world and started programming in earnest because I wanted to write shells for the MUDs out at the time. A friend and I built some amazing things all in the name of auto-mapping, adding graphics, etc etc. Simple games really help confine a problem to the point that you can grow your curiosity easily with them.

Re: Microsoft makes Zork open-source

#163

Post by anthk »

ndiddy wrote: post #139
bluedino wrote: post #18

I've seen a few things called 'Zork source code' in various places over the years (even on a CD that came with a game programming book of some sort), and copies like this: https://github.com/MITDDC/zork What's the lineage here?

Zork was originally a public-domain mainframe game called Dungeon developed at MIT. Its authors founded Infocom, split the game into 3 pieces, added more content, and released it for microcomputers as the 3 Zork games. The source code that's been floating around since the 80s is for the original Dungeon game. Between the early 80s and the early 90s, the source was translated from MDL to DEC FORTRAN to Unix f77 to C,…

Not PD, but free as a free ber and non-commercial.

Re: Microsoft makes Zork open-source

#164

Post by anthk »

VikingCoder wrote: post #112

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…

Ditto here. And, better, translated into Spanish with INFSP6. There is one made from a non-native Spanish speaker and it's really bad. Now a proper Zork translation can be a reality.

Ah, and yes, IF6 ports for Adventure do exist, both in English and Spanish, and the Spanish one it's really great, with even the backstory on creating the game perfectly translated..

Re: Microsoft makes Zork open-source

#165

Post by ndiddy »

WorldMaker wrote: post #151
skissane wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

The rights to Hitchhiker's and Shogun reverted to their credited authors (Douglas Adams and James Clavell) after they went out of print. The rest of the Infocom library was created as works for hire entirely by salaried Infocom employees, so the rights went from Infocom to Activision to Microsoft.

Re: Microsoft makes Zork open-source

#166

Post by WorldMaker »

ErroneousBosh wrote: post #93
jsnell wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Zork was originally written at MIT for PDP-10s in an obscure Lisp dialect (MDL). The authors then later formed a company to sell the game on micro-computers. To do it, they built a virtual machine optimized for this purpose, a new Lisp dialect (ZIL) that could compile to the virtual machine, and the ported the game over to that new dialect. Even so, they had to split the game into three parts to fit. The source you'r…

This is about the fourth article I've read that mentions Lisp today on here. Okay, I get it. Lisp is great. Where should I start? It wasn't like I was planning on doing anything else at work next week...

In Grad School I started with an "AI in Lisp Textbook" (which was still the most common at the time in the late oughts, I hear many have moved to Python since) and searched for a Common Lisp interpreter that felt right. I think I ended up with SBCL [0], but this was obviously a while back so my memory is slippery about it.

(The professor I had for that AI course in Grad School didn't know Lisp and wanted to learn it better, especially because so much of the textbook was in it, so asked us for volunteers to learn it as well and I took that as an excuse/challenge to do every project with a language choice that semester in Common Lisp.)

[0] https://www.sbcl.org/

Re: Microsoft makes Zork open-source

#167

Post by DonHopkins »

calibas wrote: post #16

It is pitch black. You are likely to be eaten by a grue.

If this predicament seems particularly cruel, consider whose fault it could be: not a torch or a match in your inventory.

MC Frontalot - It Is Pitch Dark

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4nigRT2KmCE

Featuring Steve Meretzky!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steve_Meretzky

Re: Microsoft makes Zork open-source

#168

Post by anthk »

WorldMaker wrote: post #141
danso wrote: post #85

So how good are the latest coding agents? Like if I asked Gemini 3/Claude/ChatGPT 5.1 to convert it into something that could run from a Python interpreter, how far would they get? (I assume Zork Implementation Language is not well represented in the training corpus)

The easiest way to get it to run from a Python interpreter would be to compile the ZIL source to a Z-Machine binary, which you can do with ZILF [1], then use a Z Machine library in Python (such as a pure Python implementation of the Z-Machine [2]) to load/run it. A coding agent may even be able to suggest that path, as knowledge of at least the existence of both ZILF and Python ZVM should be in training sets. The mor…

Also if you don't wall to install a whole C# stack on constrained netbook/non supoprted old machine:

https://notabug.org/coderain/zilutils

EDIT: Wrong link. Wait, I'm sure there's a C based alternative out there.

Re: Microsoft makes Zork open-source

#170

Post by WorldMaker »

boomboomsubban wrote: post #123

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?

The writing should be assumed to be subject to copyright still even though the code is open source.

In this case it sounds like Microsoft's Legal has taken the assumption the writing is applicable under the code license and is mostly seeking to enforce trademarks and brand (don't commercially release something implying it is a Microsoft-approved Zork) more than the writing, per Scott's wording of Microsoft's legal requests here: https://github.com/historicalsource/zork1/pull/3

Obviously, I'm not a lawyer, that's not legal advice, build commercial derivatives at your own risk and with your own lawyer's advice.

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