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Microsoft makes Zork open-source

opensource.microsoft.com

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Re: Microsoft makes Zork open-source

#231

Post by ChicagoDave »

VikingCoder wrote: post #150
WorldMaker wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That is the exactly the suggested compiler in this blog post. (These repos have been compiled with it for a while. The biggest change in these [Internet Archive-uploaded] repos is an official Microsoft-backed MIT License as opposed to assuming Fair Use for Archival Use prior to now.) I'm hoping Microsoft may have a chance to open source more of the original Infocom compilers and VMs, even if they would be hard to run…

Zilf liked it, but Zapf is flagged by Windows 11 Smart App Control as potentially dangerous to my machine... And there's no way to turn it off for one app. And if I turn it off, I can only turn it back on by re-installing Windows. What the bloody... So now I want to download and build. But it's .net 10, so I apparently need VS 2026, which I hadn't bothered to install yet. Oh my.

You just need dotnet core. You can compile from a command line on any os. You can install dotnet on linux.

Re: Microsoft makes Zork open-source

#233

Post by matheusmoreira »

DonHopkins wrote: post #173
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…

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…

> Probably the most distinctive feature of MDL is its mechanism for user-defined types, which is the best of any language with which we are familiar.

> User-defined types have been retrofitted on some of the newer versions of Lisp, but in most cases they can be used only with special functions and cannot be used in the same general way that Lists can.

Can you elaborate on this? The examples from the PFF suggest it's just the usual lispy type declarations.

Re: Microsoft makes Zork open-source

#234

Post by matheusmoreira »

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...

The first step is to overcome the syntax. It's useful to think in terms of Python syntax at first.

  f(x)
  (f x)
  ["f", "x"]

  (print (
Lisp code is just list data which gets evaluated by an interpreter function. Like this:

  code = ["print", ["
Filling out that eval function is a great way to learn. I only truly understood lisp when I implemented my own.

These articles are very good and accessible:

https://www.norvig.com/lispy.html

https://norvig.com/lispy2.html

Re: Microsoft makes Zork open-source

#235

Post by drob518 »

martinpw wrote: post #180
drob518 wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Wrote a mini adventure game in BASIC for the ZX-81. Since it only had 1K of RAM, each room in the game had to be a separate program (max around 25 lines of code or so), and at the end of the room, depending on what actions you took, it asked you to wind the cassette tape to a specific location to load a new room. When I could finally afford the 16K RAM pack, I rewrote it as a single application. Couldn't believe how…

Where there’s a will, there’s a way, I’d say. Amazing!

Re: Microsoft makes Zork open-source

#236

Post by drob518 »

WorldMaker wrote: post #146
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?

MDL is what was in wide use at MIT at the time, the PDP-10 era. The M in MDL is sometimes "MIT" in the various backronyms of what it stood for. (Mostly it was apparently just short for "muddle", a self-deprecating description.) (Also, to be technically correct, these source files aren't even MDL, they are a further descendant called ZIL [Zork Implementation Language].)

Yea, I get that MDL came from MIT, but I have to think that MACLISP was far more used at MIT at that time. But maybe not.

Re: Microsoft makes Zork open-source

#237

Post by drob518 »

larsbrinkhoff wrote: post #222
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?

Because Zork was written on the MIT Dynamic Modeling PDP-10. MDL was an important part of the software ecosystem on that computer, but Lisp wasn't. On the other MIT PDP-10 computers, Maclisp reined.

Was there any particular reason they did that, or was it just a random coincidence (that was the team that wrote it and the hardware they had access to was that particular machine and that particular machine ran MDL, otherwise, it would have been MACLISP)? Was there anything about MDL that helped with writing an adventure game?

Re: Microsoft makes Zork open-source

#238

Post by bluGill »

bluGill wrote: post #127
1313ed01 wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Just noticed (too late to edit), this was a pre-OSX mac version. m68k I believe.

Re: Microsoft makes Zork open-source

#239

Post by VikingCoder »

ChicagoDave wrote: post #231
VikingCoder wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Zilf liked it, but Zapf is flagged by Windows 11 Smart App Control as potentially dangerous to my machine... And there's no way to turn it off for one app. And if I turn it off, I can only turn it back on by re-installing Windows. What the bloody... So now I want to download and build. But it's .net 10, so I apparently need VS 2026, which I hadn't bothered to install yet. Oh my.

You just need dotnet core. You can compile from a command line on any os. You can install dotnet on linux.

Very true - but I also wanted to try VS 2026.

I'm no Docker developer, but I'm working on a Dockerfile to build zilf, build zork, and run frotz.

Re: Microsoft makes Zork open-source

#240

Post by textfiles »

fainpul wrote: post #142
MrZongle2 wrote: post #131

The cynic in me believes that this only took place after numerous meetings during which the question "is there any way we can still make money from this" was repeatedly answered with "no".

My guess is they wanted to create some good publicity for once, to distract from all the shit they get for their AI stunts and Windows fuckups.

Neither of those guesses are the case.
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