Running Zork on .NET

Remember the Infocom games from the good old days? I am talking about games like Zork. Well there is an Infocom game interpreter called Frotz out there. It allows you to play Infocom games on modern day PCs. Frotz is written in the C programming language.

Well guess what? Frotz has been ported to C#. It now has a WPF front end as well. This thing needs the .NET 4.0 runtime to work. I just read a blog post that some guy tried this newly ported interpreter, and had Zork I up and running fine. This sounds like good stuff.

Silverlight Media Framework

Microsoft has an open source framework called the Silverlight Media Framework, or SMF for short. It is a framework for video. This allows you to create your own media player. Cool stuff.

SMF makes use of the Smooth Streaming Player Development Kit. This additional kit is not open source. You create your own Silverlight project. Then you use SMF and this kit within it.

The technique is to inherit from the SMF player. Then you extend the capabilities as you see fit. Settings are downloaded from a server via an XML file. Check it out.