Microsoft makes Zork open-source

Re:Microsoft makes Zork open-source by danso on Thursday November 20, 2025 @03:14PM (#45997087)

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)

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Re:Microsoft makes Zork open-source by WorldMaker on Thursday November 20, 2025 @05:07PM (#45998499)

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 more interesting questions would be how much a coding agent could help you write new Zork rooms or similar things in ZIL now that these ZIL source files are MIT licensed. I would also assume ZIL is not well represented, it's fork of the Lisp family tree (Lisp -> MDL -> ZIL) in generally probably not well represented in open source code bases up to this point. (Some of that may depend on if the agent was trained on some of these historicalsource repos ahead of this open source license change, too.)

[1] https://zilf.io/

[2] https://github.com/sussman/zvm

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Re:Microsoft makes Zork open-source by anthk on Thursday November 20, 2025 @05:51PM (#45998975)

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.

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Re:Microsoft makes Zork open-source by taradinoc on Monday November 24, 2025 @07:56PM (#46041191)

A C-based alternative for compiling ZIL? I don't believe there's one that works. The two options for compiling ZIL code are to run ZILF on a modern system or to run ZILCH on a PDP-10 emulator.

The good news is you don't need to install any C# development tools if you use the prepackaged binaries, since they're standalone executables.

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