San Francisco, May 8

Tech giant Microsoft has open-sourced the code for the 27-year-old programme, 3D Movie Maker, after a user asked for it on the micro-blogging site Twitter.

Foone, whose Twitter profile said they are a "hardware and software necromancer", asked the tech giant for the source code to the programme so they could expand and extend it, reports Engadget.

Microsoft does not own the BRender engine it runs on, which potentially posed a problem, but the one who does own it told Foone that he would be happy to open-source it if he can find a copy.

As per the report, someone kept a copy of the engine and Microsoft was able to release the programme's code in its entirety.

3D Movie Maker, which was released in 1995, gives users an easy way to create films by placing cartoony characters and props into pre-rendered environments.

According to PCGamer, Foone plans to update the programme so it can run on modern PCs, as well as add features to make it easier to share the resulting videos.

ians