Reviving Classic Unix Games: A 20-Year Journey Through Software Archaeology • Hacker News Board

Re: Reviving Classic Unix Games: A 20-Year Journey Through Software Archaeology

#81

Post by blacksmith_tb » Mon, Nov 10, 2025, 5:57 PM UTC

sombragris wrote: post #79

Slackware offers bsd-games as part of the base distribution: https://mirrors.slackware.com/slackware/slackware64-current/... In addition, SBo (Slackware equivalent to BSD's port system with 3rd party software) offers nbsd-games, a series of classic Unix games with a ncurses interface: https://slackbuilds.org/repository/15.0/games/nbsdgames/ It's nice to see true classics being preserved in one of those packages.

Lots of distros should have the bsdgames package, for example Debian (and thus Ubuntu, Pop!_OS etc.): https://packages.debian.org/stable/games/bsdgames

Re: Reviving Classic Unix Games: A 20-Year Journey Through Software Archaeology

#82

Post by shagie » Mon, Nov 10, 2025, 8:27 PM UTC

inciampati wrote: post #6

Love that a term from Vinge has almost entered our lexicon. The author is a "programmer archeologist".

    “The wonder of it—the horror of it, Sura said—was that unlike the useless wrecks of Canberra’s past, these programs still worked! And via a million million circuitous threads of inheritance, many of the oldest programs still ran in the bowels of the Qeng Ho system. Take the Traders’ method of timekeeping. The frame corrections were incredibly complex—and down at the very bottom of it was a little program that ran a counter. Second by second, the Qeng Ho counted from the instant that a human had first set foot on Old Earth’s moon. But if you looked at it still more closely…the starting instant was actually about fifteen million seconds later, the 0-second of one of Humankind’s first computer operating systems.”

Re: Reviving Classic Unix Games: A 20-Year Journey Through Software Archaeology

#83

Post by phs318u » Wed, Nov 12, 2025, 4:54 AM UTC

AmbroseBierce wrote: post #58

inciampati wrote: post #6

Love that a term from Vinge has almost entered our lexicon. The author is a "programmer archeologist".

Coming soon: AI models archeologists

I think we'll get AI model psychiatrists first.

Re: Reviving Classic Unix Games: A 20-Year Journey Through Software Archaeology

#84

Post by billfruit » Sat, Nov 15, 2025, 2:10 AM UTC

vejeta wrote: post #29

billfruit wrote: post #9

There use to be a set of games which were available for SunOS and may be Solaris, including a flight simulator with wired frame graphics, and Sun even had released a book about these games at that time(may be early 1990's). Are they also covered by these? Anyone remember a flight simulator with wireframe graphics available Unices?

Hello, I am the author of the article. I did not know of those games you mention at the time. We used to play conquer at the AIX (Unix) that our computer labs provided for all the alumni. I have only tracked conquer's authors to obtain their permissions to relicense and preserve in a way that others could study and build upon.

"The Book of Unix Games" by Janice Winsor is the book. Seems hard to find now.

Re: Reviving Classic Unix Games: A 20-Year Journey Through Software Archaeology

#85

Post by billfruit » Sat, Nov 15, 2025, 4:02 PM UTC

anthk wrote: post #19

billfruit wrote: post #9

There use to be a set of games which were available for SunOS and may be Solaris, including a flight simulator with wired frame graphics, and Sun even had released a book about these games at that time(may be early 1990's). Are they also covered by these? Anyone remember a flight simulator with wireframe graphics available Unices?

ACM, Sabre?

It doesn't seem to be that widely known, any reason why?