Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Microsoft makes Zork open-source

opensource.microsoft.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

31–40 of 256 posts

Re: Microsoft makes Zork open-source

#31

Post by jsnell »

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 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're linking to is the original MDL source. This is about the ZIL source for the three games that the original Zork was split into.

Re: Microsoft makes Zork open-source

#33

Post by OhMeadhbh »

pjmlp wrote: post #19
OhMeadhbh wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Dang. I had forgotten Zenimax got scooped up by MSFT Gaming a few years back. It's not an unreasonable request, though I suspect it should be made directly to MSFT Gaming.

By number of acquired studios, Microsoft is one of the biggest publishers, hence even if XBox the console goes bust, they still have a big weight as Microsoft Game Studios and XBox brand.

And they're been doing it for a while. They bought Ensemble DECADES ago.

Re: Microsoft makes Zork open-source

#35

Post by iddan »

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.

Most of the money to be made is by licensing software to organisations that can afford the risk of pirating (practically anything bigger than SMBs: enterprises, governments, armies, etc). The moat of everyone used to your platform worths a lot more. So they just regulate enough so it won’t seem like they don’t give a shit at all.

Re: Microsoft makes Zork open-source

#37

Post by pm215 »

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 others don't seem to have the MIT license pullreq added, so they are not open source; the source code is merely available. The repos have a note:

"This collection is meant for education, discussion, and historical work, allowing researchers and students to study how code was made for these interactive fiction games and how the system dealt with input and processing. It is not considered to be under an open license."

This github repo has been up for some years now (this old blog post has some back story: https://blog.zarfhome.com/2019/04/all-of-infocoms-game-sourc... ) -- AFAIK it's the source contents from an old hard drive image from back when Infocom was a company.

(I only checked hitchhikers and starcross, because github is giving a lot of error pages for these right now.)

Re: Microsoft makes Zork open-source

#40

Post by fsckboy »

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?

i'm not a complete expert on this, but the dates entailed here trigger clear memories.

the date on the Zork archive you linked to is 1977. in 1977 there was not really yet a notable software market for personal computers based on microcomputer chips, and software development at MIT in that timeframe would have been on Multics or DEC-10 or 20's and (probably not quite) the dawn of Vax-750s

just a couple years later the names on the archive you linked to went on to found infocom to sell this software ported to personal computers, Apple II 6502's or CPM S-100 bus 8080 and Z80s.

the Colossol Cave Adventure game for the PDP-10 had been released (to other institutions that had PDP-10's) just a couple years before and had caught fire in popularity at universities. These people at MIT took the same idea and reimplemented it with embellishments.

Post reply on HN