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The Zork Trilogy is available on Activision's web site.

You can play Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy on Douglas Adams' official page.

None of the other Infocom classics are currently free, that I know of.

It's certainly a pleasure to take advantage of those publishers that have decided to relinquish their right to not distribute.

Thank you Activision and Douglas Adams.

If I remember correctly, http://www.activision.com/
Of course, with my memory, don't get all excited:P

(Disclosure: I'm a former video game developer for one of the companies mentioned below)

Classic video games are still profitable. While we may look back at some of the old games and say they're worthless now, they're still being sold in many cases.

Activision is selling 30 Intellivision games on one PSX CD for $29.

Midway is selling their "Greatest Hits" Volume 1 and Volume 2(no longer on their site).

Atary (admittedly part of Midway now) is also selling a Greatest Hits cd.

Namco has a Museum 1, Museum 3, and Museum 64 collection out now.

Also, making the games GPL'ed is really silly. Lots of old games get remakes, why would manufacturers want the market filled with 500 versions of a past title when they want to make a new one?

While this is surely going to be considered flamebait by many... The same copyright law that allows the creators of video games to set their own terms of distribution is the SAME LAW that allows GPL developers to set which restrictions there are on distributing GPL'ed code.

So many people say that copyright laws need to be thrown out or changed... Want copyright laws reduced to 5 years? That means a 5 year old Linux kernel would be free for anyone to do as they wish with, without GPL'ed restrictions. All the old GNU binutils would have no protection at all. While I agree that insanely long copyrights don't do a lot of good for society, people are trading ROMS for some rather recent games.

MAME now supports Rampage World Tour, a Midway game released in 1999. A quick check of a few big ROM sites turn up the ROMs for this game. This game is STILL ON THE SHELVES for consoles, and the ROMs are being traded. Any half-way excuse of "preservation of classics" is out the window at this point.

I like classic games more than most. I've got an extensive library of old game boards in my basement. I also like having the games on my PC, but I buy the classics CD's when they come out.

Remember, just because something isn't for sale anymore doesn't mean it's free, or even should be.

-- Kevin

If you look at all the proprietary operating systems, their community is very different from the BSD/Linux community.

Even the BeOS-community which seem to be rather enthusiastic is still mostly closed source.

As another example, consider the Apple II community...due to the age of the hardware involved (last new design hit the market in '88, last Apple II rolled off the assembly line in '93...or was it '92?), you're dealing with an even smaller niche than with anything that runs on modern hardware. You can almost always count on a flamewar in progress in comp.sys.apple2 regarding 15- or 20-year-old software up on FTP sites...not even just for software from the few companies from that period that are still around in some form or other (someone like Broderbund or Activision), but also from long-dead companies that just disappeared (someone like Epyx or Muse). The few people who are still coding today for the II also seem to be inordinately occupied with how much money they might be able to squeeze out of a project, even though they know it's been pretty much impossible for years now to code for the II as your day job.

FWIW, the last two releases I've done for the Apple II have been GPL'd. One was a digital-audio player for the 8-bit IIs that I open-sourced in 1992. The more recent one was a DHR character generator (no link at this time) that provided an easy way to mix graphics and text under BASIC. A more significant open-source release was GNO, a mulitasking command-line shell for GS/OS. Beyond my two programs and GNO, I can't think of any other open-source releases for the Apple II in recent years (public-domain software excluded because of the way derivative works can be made closed).

_/_
/ v \
(IIGS( Scott Alfter (remove Voyager's hull # to send mail)
\_^_/

Strange measure of laziness - if France can maintain itself as a player in global politics while reducing working hours for the citizens, they have my vote for a cool system. Ever played Civilization: Call to Power? Even gaming authors are aware of the fact that only an advanced economy can tranform efficiency into happiness as well as wealth. As other posters have already stated - why are you attacking France? For defending the privacy of its citizens? Stay on subject here.

There's a great article on the hazards of asteroid exploration here
--Shoeboy

There are open source interpreters for the Infocom game "databases" (for lack of a better word) available, and a while back Activision (who now owns the rights to these, I suppose) released a CD with about 30 or so games on it, including the three Zorks. In fact, it had just about everything except Hitchhiker's Guide... It also included the Invisiclues hint/map books and promotional material (well, like the little magazines and such, no toys) in PDF format.

Here it is, still available. 15 bucks. I can't recall how it stores the files on the CD, so you might have to extract the files under dosemu or wine or something...

-LjM

It's nice to see that I can still buy the Zork set (for $15!), and I'm sure with a little twiddling the Z-code could be run on Your Favorite Platform... (I ordered the Infocom Masterpieces from here. Search for Infocom on http://store.activision.com/ if the link is broken)

It's nice to see that I can still buy the Zork set (for $15!), and I'm sure with a little twiddling the Z-code could be run on Your Favorite Platform... (I ordered the Infocom Masterpieces from here. Search for Infocom on http://store.activision.com/ if the link is broken)

kmj