Reviving Classic Unix Games: A 20-Year Journey Through Software Archaeology
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Re: Reviving Classic Unix Games: A 20-Year Journey Through Software Archaeology
#2I remember something similar from my university days (30-odd years ago) called Empire. This still lives on here [1]. There was many a map printed out on the laser printer (and my prof wanted to know why his budget was so much higher that term...) back in the day. We played against other colleges of the university of Londone over JANet, and I ran the server on a DECstation 5000, somewhat less powerful than my watch these days...
Empire has the concept of a "Bureaucratic Time Unit" which recovered to its maximum in real time every update, and was based on how many civilians (as opposed to military) you had in your capital city. I always thought that was a pretty cool idea - every operation took X BTU's, so you couldn't log on at 3am and utterly nuke another country before they woke up. 3am was still the popular time to start nuking another country, of course :)
I still remember waking up (I splurged on a 1200-baud modem rather than the standard 300-baud one) in the morning, logging in on my Atari ST before I went to college, and seeing "You have 2000 telegrams...". Oh crap. You got telegrams for lots of reasons, but one of those reasons was an attack. It was all part of the "All the news that's fit to print!" messaging system. Just like 'Diplomacy', half the game was in the interaction between people, alliances and betrayals, not just getting stat X to 100% ... [1]: http://www.wolfpackempire.com
Re: Reviving Classic Unix Games: A 20-Year Journey Through Software Archaeology
#3I remember something similar from my university days (30-odd years ago) called Empire. This still lives on here [1]. There was many a map printed out on the laser printer (and my prof wanted to know why his budget was so much higher that term...) back in the day. We played against other colleges of the university of Londone over JANet, and I ran the server on a DECstation 5000, somewhat less powerful than my watch th…
The creator of this game is a frequent contributor on this site.
Re: Reviving Classic Unix Games: A 20-Year Journey Through Software Archaeology
#4I remember something similar from my university days (30-odd years ago) called Empire. This still lives on here [1]. There was many a map printed out on the laser printer (and my prof wanted to know why his budget was so much higher that term...) back in the day. We played against other colleges of the university of Londone over JANet, and I ran the server on a DECstation 5000, somewhat less powerful than my watch th…
The creator of this game is a frequent contributor on this site. https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=WalterBright
TIL :)
Re: Reviving Classic Unix Games: A 20-Year Journey Through Software Archaeology
#5Before xtrek and eventually netrek, there was hunt:
https://techtinkering.com/2009/08/11/my-top-10-classic-text-...
you might think that games back then were slow but this one was fast paced mayhem.
using the vi commands was perfect.
Re: Reviving Classic Unix Games: A 20-Year Journey Through Software Archaeology
#6Love that a term from Vinge has almost entered our lexicon. The author is a "programmer archeologist".
Re: Reviving Classic Unix Games: A 20-Year Journey Through Software Archaeology
#7Comp.souces.games was a source of delight and pain as I learned how to port software from sizeof(int) == sizeof(void *) architectures.
Re: Reviving Classic Unix Games: A 20-Year Journey Through Software Archaeology
#8How were the contributions by Richard Caley handled? "The legal reality was harsh: Richard’s contributions to Conquer couldn’t be relicensed. The university couldn’t help contact heirs due to privacy laws."
Re: Reviving Classic Unix Games: A 20-Year Journey Through Software Archaeology
#9There 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?
Re: Reviving Classic Unix Games: A 20-Year Journey Through Software Archaeology
#10Nice to see this happening, FWIW:
I uploaded a very old Star Trek Game I think from 1973. I got it from the Coherent OS people. You can get it by issuing these commands:
curl 'gopher://sdf.org/0/users/jmccue/repository/trek-73.tar.gz' -o trek-73.tar.gz
curl 'gopher://sdf.org/0/users/jmccue/repository/trek-73.tar.gz.asc' -o trek-73.tar.gz.asc
and my gpg key in case you want to validate the download:
curl 'gopher://sdf.org/0/users/jmccue/jmcsdf.asc' -o jmcsdf.asc