awesome
Microsoft makes Zork open-source
211–220 of 256 posts
Re: Microsoft makes Zork open-source
#212Re: Microsoft makes Zork open-source
#213Re: Microsoft makes Zork open-source
#214The 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…
I wonder how well a code agent would do on porting the code?
Re: Microsoft makes Zork open-source
#215Why does Microsoft own the rights to Zork?
Interesting that the linked repo is 7 years old...
Re: Microsoft makes Zork open-source
#216When 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…
That's really nice. I remember when I was 8 or so, I phoned up NASA and told them I'd drawn up plans for a spaceship. The lady on the phone sweetly took me very seriously and asked questions about where such a thing would launch (answer: any big airport). She encouraged me to send them in.
Around the same time (1988) my best friend and I started making our first game in HyperCard. Getting more immediate results from that is probably how I ended up a SWE instead of in aerospace.
Re: Microsoft makes Zork open-source
#217If you ask Claude to simulate Zork you get a text adventure that is loosely based on Zork, but entirely different.
And better.
Re: Microsoft makes Zork open-source
#218Earlier 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…
The MDL Programming Language Primer; Michael Dornbrook, Marc Blank: https://donhopkins.com/home/archive/MDL_Programming_Primer.p... Introduction Over the years the original MDL (pronounced "Muddle") Primer by Greg Pfister [Pfister 72] became more and more a reference manual and less a Primer from which a novice could learn the language. Some of the text of the original has been re-used in this document, but much has…
> Since MDL is a distant relative of Lisp
Is it really that distant?
> The similarities between MDL and Lisp are such that in many cases a few minor changes to Lisp code will convert it into working MDL code.
I guess not.
Reading a bit of the code it looked superficially like a relatively standard Lisp but with some unusual syntax choices.
Re: Microsoft makes Zork open-source
#219Earlier quoted context omitted.
When I was around six years old, my older brothers convinced me computer games were written in paragraph form. I wrote a lot of games! Asteroids went something like this, "You fly around in a ship that is a triangle. When you shoot asteroids they break up into smaller asteroids." My brothers got a lot of laughs out of those "programs". Fast-forward 45 years and whose laughing now?! :)
If you had gotten a patent on vibe coding, you'd be laughing now.
Setting aside how it hopefully wouldn’t have been patentable anyway, 45 years ago means it would have expired in 2000.