Kevin Becker .net » Windows

Running Zork Games on XP, Vista, Linux, & Mac OS X

Kevin — Wed, 02 Jul 2008 03:11:57 +0000

Back in 2004, I wrote a guide for getting the game Zork Grand Inquisitor running on Windows XP. The game didn’t work well without the guide because it was originally designed for Windows 98. I’ve been a fan of the Zork series for almost 10 years now. After receiving a message from another Zork fan in regards to that guide I wrote, I decided that it was time to look into the games again. With a few changes, the more modern games in the series are supported under Windows XP and possibly Vista. That’s when I had an idea. With Wine, DOSBox and Frotz, it should be possible to run any Zork game on Linux and Mac OS X too. With that, it becomes feasible to run any game in the Zork series on any major operating system. That’s a big task. I began a project to work on making that idea a reality. I’m not alone though. I’m receiving some help and hosting from DAT, the maintainer of the only Zork website still active, The Zork Library.

The guides are currently at http://www.kevinbecker.net/zorkguides and will soon be hosted on http://www.thezorklibrary.com as well. The project is a work in progress and needs help on the configurations I can’t test myself, mainly Mac OS X and Vista. Help with writing the guides and testing them, as well as comments and questions would be greatly appreciated!

Functional Programming from Microsoft?

Kevin — Sun, 11 Nov 2007 23:30:01 +0000

Ars Technica reports that Microsoft will be bringing a functional programming lanaguage to Visual Studio, called F#. The language is a functional langugage that is based on OCaml and will of course link in with .Net.

I find this very interesting. Learning different programming paradigms (like procedural, object-oriented, functional, structured, logic and so on) is a good thing for programmers to do. I see this as a good thing that Microsoft is encouraging functional programming. My favorite lesser-known programming language is Scheme, another functional programming language.

One of the problems with less popular programming lanaguages (the popular ones are usually only procedural, structural or object-oriented languages) is that there are few libraries to support them so its hard to actually do something useful. Microsoft linking F# to .Net will be benefitial to the Windows world by bringing the power of .Net (and Mono, in a way) to functional programming. I have a feeling that Microsoft Live Labs has something to do with this and did it so they can do cool projects that take advantage of functional programming paradigms.

This news just shows yet again how unpredictable Microsoft is because of its size. Some parts of it are making blunder after blunder while others keep doing tons of amazing things like this.

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Of Old Software

Kevin — Sat, 07 Apr 2007 18:49:28 +0000

This post is mainly for myself, but I think others could benefit as well. For my music listening needs (on Windows), I always use Winamp. But not just any Winamp. I’ve found that Winamp has become quite bloated with feature creep over the last few years. Winamp 2 was the peak of Winamp-y goodness. Winamp 3 and now Winamp 5 just add too much extra junk I don’t need. So this post is just a way for me to keep a little archive of the bare essentials I need from Winamp. This includes the installer for Winamp 2.81 and the skin Receiver by Fli7e. Both these files are now hard to find. Places like Winamp Heaven and Old Version have the installer and I found this website with the skin, but I don’t know how much longer they will be around, so I’ve decided to make an archive of my own. Plus it’s easier for me to find than googling! Enjoy the old school Winamp goodness!

Direct Downloads:

Winamp 2.81

Receiver Skin