The history of the game Zork is a long and winding one, starting with MUDs and kin on university mainframes – where students entertained themselves in between their studies – and ending…
As the readme states, you can’t actually compile the source code. The compilers are lost to time and it’s from a very obscure, proprietary fork of an obscure language. Essentially, this headline should read “Microsoft owns code not even their engineers could comprehend, so they released it for free since they couldn’t possibly make money from it”.
Sure, though interpreters have already been written for the bytecode language that this source code compiles to. It shouldn’t be too difficult for the community to write a compiler when the back-end interpreter is already there and usable for testing.
But… Why? I don’t trust them, what do they want?
As the readme states, you can’t actually compile the source code. The compilers are lost to time and it’s from a very obscure, proprietary fork of an obscure language. Essentially, this headline should read “Microsoft owns code not even their engineers could comprehend, so they released it for free since they couldn’t possibly make money from it”.
Sure, though interpreters have already been written for the bytecode language that this source code compiles to. It shouldn’t be too difficult for the community to write a compiler when the back-end interpreter is already there and usable for testing.
It is very dark, you are likely to be eaten by a grue. Or profiled by Microsoft.