Writing this thread cause of some confusion from my zquest entry in Oops! All New Formats.

For context, the story I've gathered about this thing so far is:

"Zelda Classic" is the original Zelda clone project by Armageddon Games, of which ZQuest is the name of the level editor tool in Zelda Classic. At some point, Zelda Classic is made open source under the GPLv3 license. However, there are two different GitHub repos hosting Zelda Classic: ZeldaClassic/ZeldaClassic

, which the official zeldaclassic.com website claims was unrightfully moved out of their Amageddon Games' ownership

, and ArmageddonGames/ZeldaClassic

which is under Armageddon Games' ownership and has some strange notice about the "theft" of the original repository (which you can reda for yourself). Funnily enough, the downloads page on the official site

links to both repositories.

To add more confusion to the picture, there is a "ZQuest Classic" with its accompanying website, zquestclassic.com

, and its ZQuestClassic GitHub repo

which is also still seeing active development. It looks like this might be a "more proper" fork of the ZeldaClassic repo, but I'm not sure if the two are compatible with each other or not.

Zelda Classic's latest stable version is 2.53.1 whereas ZQuest Classic is on version 2.55.7. As mentioned before, both repos have recent activity. ZQuest Classic has prebuilt Linux binaries whereas Zelda Classic only seems to have Windows binaries, and the build instructions are super complicated for some reason.

As far as the format requirements go, the format is titled "ZQuest Classic". The lyceum article points to the zeldaclassic.com site for the official download, but purezc.net points to zquestclassic.com for the ZC download. The lyceum article also mentions Zelda Classic by name. So it's not clear if we should/can use ZQuest Classic or should stick to Zelda Classic.

oh my god this is a nightmare lol, i do recall reading that there had been some drama behind the software but i had no idea the well ran so deep.

i am not even sure what i think the right answer is; iirc my decisions about naming the format were based on a) the original request for a "zquest" format - which predates any of this drama - and b) the version that i happened to download, which was indeed ZQuest Classic 2.55.x. ergo, i didn't intend to take sides with that choice, nor to define the scope of the format one way or the other.

yikes! if they're both being actively developed then it would be messy to support both, but imagine the feel-bads of using the wrong flavor

tbh its very similar to the famitracker situation, except here it was not drama causing the splitup but simply a ... very dedicated but unoriganized community? lol
we have famiplus now which allows technically """all the different forks""" even tho theres the dn-ft v5 which can load all submitted entries mostly.

in smw you need to have three or four different patch roms ready, because entries may or may not patch correctly depending on the original rom used.

for zquest voting, after funute told me about the different versions, i simply got them both - if one of them failed to load an entry, i just tried the other one to open it.
i wld say the most annoying part wld be to regularly update them if development continues. but on the other hand, i already have that issue with furnace and mpt etc... they tell me "made in newer version" ALL THE FUCKING TIME,....
so i either ignore it or do it once in a while.

for xhb purposes (i dont think we will see many zquest minors anyway), in case of doubt im sure the chat can figure it out.

so tldr: i am in support for both versions being allowed. i dont rly see damis point that it wld be messy to support both

haha wow this is fresh too, 2 weeks ago

https://github.com/ArmageddonGames/ZeldaClassic/commit/aa1ccbf694f1d8a401f75b912b0acde604261074

hurts to see the obvious deadname callout in that blog post tho

edit: it looks like ZQuest Classic is the version that War Lord claims was stolen, not the "ZeldaClassic/ZeldaClassic" repo. i have no idea why the two different ZeldaClassic repos exist. but the Zelda Classic downloads page does mention a version 2.55, which must be referring to ZQuest Classic

Yeah the "epitaph" in the AG repo README is very strange and unfitting to say the least.

Jangler is right though, in the notice posted on the site

it specifically references and links the ZQuestClassic GitHub organization. The argument made in the notice seems shaky, as it points to the GPL clauses for conveyance of the source code but tries to use them to claim that removing/changing the owning organization of the repo is not permitted by these clauses. I'm not a lawyer and don't know how the GPL terms are supposed to be applied, but this feels like a stretch.

As for the downloads on zeldaclassic.com, the 2.55 alpha 107 download link doesn't actually work - after failing, the link actually redirects to this Discord CDN URL

which returns a 404 due to the Discord attachment URL changes. The Current Downloads page on their site only list the repos, the 2.53.0 LTS version, and a 2.53.1 beta version. This page also has the "ZQuest Classic" name at the bottom?

Upon further inspection of the AG repo commits

, seems like actual development only goes up to Mar 18, 2021, and the recent activity in the AG repo was just to update the README. Meanwhile, the ZQuestClassic repo commits

seem to have everything from the AG repo up until the README updates (so including the last code-related commit in Mar 18, 2021). So I guess it's a matter of whether the AG version should be used as the "official" version, or the ZQC version should be used as the "active/updated" version.

there's also the question, if updates will rly give any big benefits over the current most recent version(s).
we cld also just settle down on one specific version which works for the biggest amount of people and if a random repo/branch adds one new feature or item, maybe it's justifiable to ... ignore that? x)

I can't rly imagine anyone to come in and say "but v2.23.5.1.5 from repo z branch d is my absolute favorite version and I can't work with any other one"

to add to the confusion, the "zquest developers" patreon linked from the zquest classic repo links to 1) zeldaclassic.com, where the first content item on the page is the condemnation of the repository "theft" 2) the zeldaclassic.com download page, where there is no download link for 2.55 / zquest classic, and 3) the AG repo with the aforementioned "epitaph"

on a more helpful note, there are a ton of commits from (much) earlier this year in the zeldaclassic/zeldaclassic repo but they seem to be almost all tiny "refactoring" changes rather than added functionality, and the beta version available for download on the ZC website is 5 years old now. to me it feels safe to assume that AG ZC is dead and that zquest classic is the present and future of the medium