Microsoft Comic Chat open-sourced on GitHub

Microsoft Comic Chat open-sourced on GitHub

Microsoft Comic Chat is now open source

Takeaway: Microsoft has published the source code of its 1996 IRC client Comic Chat on GitHub, turning a nostalgic, Comic‑Sans‑laden chat experiment into a publicly available artifact for historians, developers, and retro‑computing fans.

Why the release matters

Releasing Comic Chat preserves a unique chapter of online‑communication evolution and provides a concrete example of early visual‑chat experimentation. The repository includes the original 1996 Visual C++ 4.0/MFC code, snapshots of the shipped binaries, and a few AI‑assisted modernization attempts that demonstrate how to build the project with current Visual Studio tools and connect to modern IRC servers.

"By releasing Comic Chat as open source, we’re preserving an important piece of software history and giving the community an opportunity to explore, learn, and build upon it." – Microsoft Open Source Blog

The original vision and technology

Comic Chat transformed plain‑text IRC messages into comic‑style panels with illustrated characters, speech bubbles, and expressive gestures. The client parsed textual cues (e.g., "I like that" → self‑pointing pose) and selected appropriate character poses, facial expressions, and panel layouts in real time. This made the client a real‑time editorial engine, not just a skin over IRC.

The underlying research was presented at SIGGRAPH '96:

DJ Kurlander, Tim Skelly, and David Salesin published a paper describing the automatic illustration construction and layout engine used in Comic Chat. (Link: https://news.microsoft.com/source/1996/08/06/microsoft-research-displays-latest-innovations-at-siggraph-96/)

The team behind the cartoon chat

  • David “DJ” Kurlander – conceived the visual‑conversation concept while at Microsoft Research’s Virtual Worlds Group.
  • Tim Skelly & David Salesin – co‑authors of the SIGGRAPH paper and contributors to the layout engine.
  • Jim Woodring – independent comic artist who created the distinctive character artwork.
  • Microsoft Research – provided the research environment and early prototypes.

Community reflections from Hacker News

  • Jeremy Herrman recalled that Comic Chat inspired his 2008 startup Chogger, a web‑based comic‑creation tool that grew to 30 K monthly users.

    "Comic Chat has a special place in my heart because it inspired my first startup back in 2008, a comic creation web app called Chogger."

  • Athas noted a technical quirk: Comic Chat extended the IRC protocol with custom strings to convey character appearance, which appeared as spam to non‑Comic‑Chat users.

    "Comic Chat extended the IRC protocol with support for explicitly indicating the appearance and emoting of your comic character… adding some nonsense string to every message."

  • AshamedCaptain mentioned that implementing the SIGGRAPH paper made for a fun student project, highlighting the educational value of the code.

    "I remember implementing the paper at some point, and though it was fun enough that it would make for a slightly less boring programming project for students."

  • IronWolve shared a modern fork that adds custom avatars, bot filtering, and extra expressions, showing active community development.

    "I added updates, ignore bots, new expressions, diff message bubble behavior, more panels, custom avatars, colors, etc."

  • smokel discovered an Easter egg in the source: the word "OXio" triggers a riddle.

    "There's an interesting easter egg in semantic.cpp, line 77: if (CheckWord(words, "OXio")) { … What’s round on the ends and hi in the middle? }"

Modernization attempts included in the repo

The GitHub repository provides three example projects that illustrate how to:

  1. Build the legacy code with Visual Studio 2022 – updated project files and minor MFC compatibility fixes.
  2. Connect to contemporary IRC networks – using modern TLS settings and IPv6.
  3. Render on high‑DPI Windows displays – scaling the original 1024×768 UI to 4K monitors.

These examples are not polished releases but serve as proof‑of‑concepts that the 1990s codebase can still run on today’s hardware.

Historical impact and legacy

Comic Chat was bundled with Internet Explorer 3 and later with Windows 98, localized into 24 languages, and shipped to millions of users. It demonstrated that chat could be visual and narrative, foreshadowing modern features such as stickers, GIF reactions, and avatar‑driven expressions.

"The early web was filled with experimentation. ‘What if chat rooms looked like comics?’ That question sounds wonderfully unreasonable. And yet it was built, shipped, localized into 24 languages, and bundled with Windows 98."

How to get started

  1. Clone the repository: git clone https://github.com/microsoft/comic-chat.git
  2. Open the ComicChat.sln solution in Visual Studio 2022.
  3. Follow the README.md instructions to build the legacy project or one of the modernization examples.
  4. Connect to an IRC server (e.g., irc.libera.chat) and join a channel that still runs the Comic Chat protocol (e.g., #hn-comic-chat).

Potential directions for the community

  • Port to other platforms – rewrite the UI layer for macOS, Linux, or web‑assembly.
  • Integrate with modern chat services – bridge Comic Chat to Discord, Slack, or Matrix using the protocol extensions described by community members.
  • AI‑driven panel generation – replace the rule‑based pose selection with a lightweight language model that generates expressions from sentiment analysis.
  • Educational use – employ the layout engine as a teaching example for graphics, natural‑language processing, and UI design.

Bottom line: The open‑source release of Microsoft Comic Chat transforms a nostalgic, Comic‑Sans‑filled IRC client into a living artifact that developers can study, remix, and extend, keeping alive a playful experiment that anticipated many of today’s visual‑messaging features.

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