Microsoft open sources 1995's "3D Movie Maker"
Including the BRender 3D engine used in games like Carmageddon.
Microsoft just released — only a few hours ago — the full source code for “Microsoft 3D Movie Maker”. A 3D, video making applications written for Windows 95 and geared towards use by kids.
The full source is available on GitHub (naturally… GitHub is part of Microsoft, after all) and is licensed under the MIT license.
This was spurred on by a series of Tweets by a retro computing (and floppy disk drive) enthusiast:
Needless to say, this is pretty fantastic news. Any time we can see source code releases for historic software, I call that a win!
An interesting side note: “Microsoft 3D Movie Maker” was developed with a 3D engine known as “BRender” — which was originally developed, by Argonaut Games, for DOS and Playstation games… such as Carmageddon.
And BRender? That engine has been released as open source as well. Full source included in the 3D Movie Maker repository.
This, of course, is not the first bit of “retro” software that Microsoft has released. Over the past few years, Microsoft has released code for MS-DOS 1.25 and 2.0, as well as the code for WinFile (the file manager in Windows 3.0) and GW-BASIC.
Now, has Microsoft released code for the vast majority of (completely abandoned and unsupported) versions of DOS or early versions of Windows? Or early Microsoft video games or productivity tools? No, certainly not. The number of items that Microsoft has released as open source (in any way) amounts to a teeny, tiny fraction (close to zero percent) of the amount of software Microsoft produced in the 1980s alone.
Just the same, I don’t like to punish progress.
And this announcement of open sourcing 3D Movie Maker is, most definitely, progress.
Keep it up, Microsoft!
If you’re taking requests: MS-DOS 5, Windows 3.1, and VB-DOS. All abandoned. None of them are currently being monetized by Microsoft. I would give Microsoft so many virtual high fives for open sourcing one of those.
