Microsoft Comic Chat is now open source

jervant

Direct link to GitHub repo: https://github.com/microsoft/comic-chat

HeliumHydride

https://bonequest.com/

jdw64

I still think this project has potential.

antics9

That’s hilarious. I hope to see some fun spinoffs. Ran comic chat on a freshly installed Win98 (or 95, don’t remember) Pentium II.

MBCook

I think it was my introduction to IRC. If not it would have been shortly after.

superkuh

Microsoft Comic Chat was my first introduction to IRC. I was just a kid poking around in system32 directory and found mschat.exe. It opened a whole new world. I still participate in IRC communities to this day. I regularly reference it. So it's a shame that microsoft is blocking non-corporate browsers from accessing this news release, "The request is blocked. 20260716T162640Z-r17d8486fc4rbjkdhC1CHI16pc00000008m000000000a54t" I imagine most people who care about MS Comic Chat aren't using Chrome or Edge. A better URL since MS is blocking might be https://www.phoronix.com/news/Microsoft-Comic-Chat-OSS or just the github repo that's in another comment.

brcmthrowaway

The creator is still at Microsoft. Lifer.

mettamage

This is so peak, haha, love it. Thanks HN, made my day :)

thebeardisred

Yes… Ha ha ha… YES!

unfunco

Only tangentially related, but I'm convinced Comic Sans is the best font option available in Slack, and everyone should try it.

ritonlajoie

This was my first introduction to internet

dmd

My fellow Americans, our long national nightmare is over.

cube00

v1.0-pre and v1.0 share the same internal version number (rup 206, "Beta 2") but differ in ~99 of 111 shared source files [1] While I shouldn't complain because they just won't do these releases in the future and I accept it was a different time; I still find it surprising Microsoft didn't have better version control considering they took it seriously enough to build their own internal version control system (SLM). [2] [1]: https://github.com/microsoft/comic-chat#:~:text=v1.0%2Dpre%2... [2]: https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20251028-00/?p=11...

Athas

Comic Chat is a piece of Internet history, but I remember that it was somewhat reviled when I first started being active on IRC. This was around 2002, so it was probably due to some cultural memory rather than anyone having actually used it in years. The issue, as I remember it, is that Comic Chat extended the IRC protocol with support for explicitly indicating the appearance and emoting of your comic character, rather than relying entirely on contextual cues. This was essentially done by adding some nonsense string to every message, which presumably could be decoded by other Comic Chat users, but read like spammy noise to everyone else. I know it did that, because I remember downloading Comic Chat to check it out, but I forget whether it was the default or not.

ok123456

https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/237170.237260 Related: The authors wrote a paper on their design of the layout engine.

cool_dude85

\me plays ahhhBeer.wav

Onavo

> Alongside the original snapshots, we’ve included a few AI-powered modernization attempts that demonstrate what’s possible—getting this 1990s-era C++ and MFC code building with current Visual Studio tools, connecting to modern IRC servers, and running legibly on today’s high-resolution Windows machines. Given that MSFT is all in on Rust and WinUI now, maybe they can try doing a full port similar to Bun using Copilot. Anthropic has been milking their Bun port attempt for as much as they can.

buildsjets

Someone wants to taste the curb! https://achewood.com/2007/07/05/title.html

stormed

Jerk City sends its regards

zetanor

Extend, embrace