How 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."
Author of the article here. Richard's contributions remain in the codebase but under original terms.
We documented his legacy as a person, and that is explained in the README of the repository.
The notion that everything had to be relicensed under the GPL “so it could be properly preserved and packaged for modern Linux distributions” seems pretty silly.
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.
When I was a kid, early 80s, my mom's job had bought some IBM computer. Not PCs, but some kind of large computer in a room to help with accounting / book keeping. Terminals with green text screens were attached to this computer. They had text based menus, and somewhere in this menu system, there were games. One game was a kind of horse race I remember, where digits were racing from left to right on the screen. Another was probably a lunar lander, but memory is lacking. Can someone tell from this description what kind of computer this was, and what OS it was running?
Oh god, netrek was addictive. At 12-14, I played it a lot on the HP-UX machines when my mom had to work weekends and drag my brother and I along (very willingly) in the mid 1990s. The early internet was also accessible to us.
Talking about netrek, I read that it originated in a game called Empire on PLATO (not the one played on rec.games.empire).
I wonder if this game be played somehow these days?
Btw the game hunt with destructable regrowing mazes is still being distributed in the bsd-games package today.
I 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
LOL, part of the charm of those games is what you mention, the plots behind the movements with the messages between the nations, the double games to make the other thing you were allied with someone, when in every turn maybe...you were sending troops by boat from another direction. People could enter deep into the roleplaying on those messages and that could be really fun. That was my experience with conquer :P
PS: I am the author of the article, and although I reached the university when the modems were being phased out (1994 or so), we played a lot to it while we were in the computer labs, instead of studying.
That's pretty cool. I think it should all be bundled into scummvm, or
an extension of this such as scummvm-history or scummvm-preservation.
We could bundle all games ever written, with a focus on older games;
and ensure they are playable (be it either by released-to-the-public,
or people having privately owned copies - the point is more than an
engine should be able to make them playable on a modern computer. And
yes, we have hardware emulators, I get it, but I am thinking here more
of making sure that the code would still work as is on any computer
system really, with a focus on omdern systems.)
I am the author of the article. I have put a quick prototype to see how a game like this could be played from the web. And it is certainly possible. I used "ttyd" as a bridge from a shell program and show the output through websockets with apache. You can check the code in https://github.com/vejeta/conquer-web.
The game is playable through the web, with the original curses interface, you can login with your nation and play, but I want the experiment to be more "curated" by providing a proper login system, to avoid any kind of attack, although the process running conquer is in an isolated docker container. Also I want to provide the help system in the web, so people can learn to play without having to login into conquer first.
I will make it free, or anyone will be able to host their own instance. If you want to tinker, what I have it is already in https://github.com/vejeta/conquer-web
Trek lives in every OpenBSD install. And OFC with any Basic interpreter running the original game.
I translated a Zmachine port into Spanish, too. ZTrek.
Angband is a roguelike that had many variants over the years, and Nick combined all of these variants into one big git repository where each variant is a branch.
It is a different game, conquer is a multiplayer strategy game, loosely based on middle-earth atmosphere, nations could be: elves, humans, dwarves, orcs, there were npc nations too: lizards, nomads, etc. Conquer is still ncurses based, probably originating from the same times (the 80s). The original author, Ed Barlow, originally published the game in USENET, comp.sources.games, as conquest, but changed the name on the second release, when noticing there was already a game called conquest, probably this one.
Stories like these make me want to give modernizing vtrek another try. I'd originally played it on my cousin's 3B2 in the late 1980s after being introduced to the CP/M port of classic trek, which I played on my family's IMS 5000SX. (Oh, how I wished at the time that we'd gotten an Apple II! But that's a story for another time.) I have distinct memories of playing vtrek on my dad's VT220, dialed into my cousin's BBS over Tymenet at 1200 baud. Whereas classic trek, having been written in the era of the ASR-33, was line-oriented like a text adventure, vtrek was a full-screen interactive terminal app, like vi. You'd issue movement commands using the 3x3 block of keys of the left side of the keyboard—Q, W, E, etc. Other keys controlled the ship's scanners, shields, weapons, and warp drive. Those inputs drove the game's event loop and updated the display accordingly. It was great fun, especially for a video game starved kid like me. I was forever pestering friends and cousins to play on their Ataris or Nintendos or Apples or Tandys. I didn't get my hands on a proper gaming computer until the early 90s, when we replaced the 5000SX with a 386.
So I'm sure you can imagine my excitement when I stumbled across an archive containing XENIX ports of a bunch of Unix games, including vtrek. (Thank you, Vince!) I'm not even sure how I managed to find that. Nowadays, Google only returns two search results for vtrek, the XENIX game port archive and a munged version of the original release to net.sources.games, and that's only if you know to include the "duncel" insult the game uses in the search terms. Google Groups searches of net.sources.games will lead you to a series of posts from the fall of 1985, but how would anyone other than an old fuddy duddy like me even know to look there? (Also, Google Groups doesn't have the original Usenet posts, so formatting is all screwed up. It's a vexing problem for the modern programmer archeologist.) Now imagine, if you will, an eager and not inexperienced nerd trying to compile a System V-era game on Linux and FreeBSD circa 2005. This Star Trek quote seems appropriate:
PAIN!
I mean, even the Real Hackers back in 1985 had problems getting it to compile, so I don't know why I thought my experience would be anything other than worse. The termios code in glibc just didn't work. At all. Neither did the sgtty code, which had been broken since at least 4.4BSD. After a good long while beating my head against vtrek, even going so far as to trying to build it on OpenStep 4.2 (from 1997) and FreeBSD 2.0 (from 1994), I gave up. Maybe it's time to give it another go for nostalgia's sake.
Author of the article here, I encourage you to do so, and share the results!
I started this journey in 2006, doing the same as you, crawling old usenet archives in the newsgroups interface taht groups.google.com provided. Finding the code was troublesome, because I lost track of it, when moving from floppy disks, to different storage systems, until it has finally been preserved on github.
I find it fascinating that your father had a VT220, did he have it at home or in his office. I thought that kind of terminals were more like a thing of labs.
Regarding that VT220, I misremembered. My dad's workplace loaned him a 1200-baud modem and a C. Itoh terminal, maybe a CIT-101 because [this picture](https://terminals-wiki.org/wiki/index.php/File:C._Itoh_CIT-1...) matches my memory. He was a software engineer and occasionally worked from home.
We also has a Wyse 50 terminal. It's how we used the IMS 5000SX, which had both a 10-MB hard disk drive (I think it was called a Winchester) and a 5.25" floppy disk drive. I have a huge stash of 5.25-inch floppy diskettes from back then, including copies of TurboDOS (for the 5000SX) and Apple II games and little BASIC programs us kids wrote, but I've all but given up on recovering anything. The IMS 5000SX and the Wyse 50 terminal are long dead and buried. I've made some half-hearted attempts to boot TurboDOS up under simh, but it isn't the same. If they aren't all corrupt, I suspect my Apple diskettes have a virus of some kind on them, too.
Around 1991-1992, I helped a dentist install an electronic medical record system using a multi-user DOS variant called PC-MOS. We connected Link MC5 terminals via serial to a 386 running SoftDent, if I'm remembering it correctly. I got one of MC5s when that system was decommissioned. Unfortunately, I lost it in a house fire. Then, a few years later, I got another of the MC5s when the dentist was doing some housecleaning. I still have that one, and I'd use it more often if there wasn't something wonky with its serial interface's flow control that causes corrupted I/O.
Love that a term from Vinge has almost entered our lexicon. The author is a "programmer archeologist".
How 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."
Author of the article here. Richard's contributions remain in the codebase but under original terms. We documented his legacy as a person, and that is explained in the README of the repository.
The notion that everything had to be relicensed under the GPL “so it could be properly preserved and packaged for modern Linux distributions” seems pretty silly.
Only if you haven‘t dealt with licenses. This software was published without a license.
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.
ACM, Sabre?
When I was a kid, early 80s, my mom's job had bought some IBM computer. Not PCs, but some kind of large computer in a room to help with accounting / book keeping. Terminals with green text screens were attached to this computer. They had text based menus, and somewhere in this menu system, there were games. One game was a kind of horse race I remember, where digits were racing from left to right on the screen. Another was probably a lunar lander, but memory is lacking. Can someone tell from this description what kind of computer this was, and what OS it was running?
System/34 or System/36, the game was RACE. Here you go: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mYRuTHz-wwk
Yes, that is how it looked like! Such nostalgia
Unfamiliar but probably System/34 or System/36 running SSP (System Support Program) with IBM 5250 series terminals.
Unsure about the games. Here’s an early lunar lander:
https://www.cs.brandeis.edu/~storer/LunarLander/LunarLander....
Another Lunar version:
https://undefinedvalue.com/lunar-for-c-and-rust.html
System/36 guide:
https://archive.org/details/bitsavers_ibmsystem3rogrammingWi...
Possible source for games in David H. Ahl in his book 101 BASIC Computer Games.
IBM System/34, System/36, or System/38 perhaps? Those are IBM's minicomputers available in that timeframe.
Before 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.
Oh god, netrek was addictive. At 12-14, I played it a lot on the HP-UX machines when my mom had to work weekends and drag my brother and I along (very willingly) in the mid 1990s. The early internet was also accessible to us.
Talking about netrek, I read that it originated in a game called Empire on PLATO (not the one played on rec.games.empire). I wonder if this game be played somehow these days?
Btw the game hunt with destructable regrowing mazes is still being distributed in the bsd-games package today.
I 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
The creator of this game is a frequent contributor on this site.
https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=WalterBright
TIL :)
LOL, part of the charm of those games is what you mention, the plots behind the movements with the messages between the nations, the double games to make the other thing you were allied with someone, when in every turn maybe...you were sending troops by boat from another direction. People could enter deep into the roleplaying on those messages and that could be really fun. That was my experience with conquer :P
PS: I am the author of the article, and although I reached the university when the modems were being phased out (1994 or so), we played a lot to it while we were in the computer labs, instead of studying.
"Play-by-Mail" games could make a comeback now:
An AI could maintain the state of a world in its "mind", take text commands from a bunch of players, and update the state the next day.
That's pretty cool. I think it should all be bundled into scummvm, or an extension of this such as scummvm-history or scummvm-preservation. We could bundle all games ever written, with a focus on older games; and ensure they are playable (be it either by released-to-the-public, or people having privately owned copies - the point is more than an engine should be able to make them playable on a modern computer. And yes, we have hardware emulators, I get it, but I am thinking here more of making sure that the code would still work as is on any computer system really, with a focus on omdern systems.)
ScummVM doesn't work that way. It needs an engine per game engine.
The discussion of Richard Caley was warming, reminded me of Izchak Miller a little bit.
Comp.souces.games was a source of delight and pain as I learned how to port software from sizeof(int) == sizeof(void *) architectures.
Conquer was an amazing game, I hope someone puts it online so I can pay again!
I am the author of the article. I have put a quick prototype to see how a game like this could be played from the web. And it is certainly possible. I used "ttyd" as a bridge from a shell program and show the output through websockets with apache. You can check the code in https://github.com/vejeta/conquer-web.
The game is playable through the web, with the original curses interface, you can login with your nation and play, but I want the experiment to be more "curated" by providing a proper login system, to avoid any kind of attack, although the process running conquer is in an isolated docker container. Also I want to provide the help system in the web, so people can learn to play without having to login into conquer first.
I will make it free, or anyone will be able to host their own instance. If you want to tinker, what I have it is already in https://github.com/vejeta/conquer-web
Nice 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
Trek lives in every OpenBSD install. And OFC with any Basic interpreter running the original game. I translated a Zmachine port into Spanish, too. ZTrek.
Is it Trek or Super Star Trek?
https://github.com/philspil66/Super-Star-Trek
https://gamicus.fandom.com/wiki/BSD_Trek
I often find the historical and archaeological aspects more important, this is a wonderful way to start the day.
If you like that kind of thing, you might like looking at the Angband Plus github repository: https://github.com/NickMcConnell/AngbandPlus
Angband is a roguelike that had many variants over the years, and Nick combined all of these variants into one big git repository where each variant is a branch.
https://inconsolation.wordpress.com/2014/10/19/conquest-much... this?
It is a different game, conquer is a multiplayer strategy game, loosely based on middle-earth atmosphere, nations could be: elves, humans, dwarves, orcs, there were npc nations too: lizards, nomads, etc. Conquer is still ncurses based, probably originating from the same times (the 80s). The original author, Ed Barlow, originally published the game in USENET, comp.sources.games, as conquest, but changed the name on the second release, when noticing there was already a game called conquest, probably this one.
Thanks for the link!
There was a Curses version of Trek called "universe" that I was obsessed with, back in the day, but I've never been able to find it again.
Classic FTP sites with UNix software don't have it. Was it for Unix?
ESR has a Python 3 port of Super Star Trek which has been enhanced a lot:
https://gitlab.com/esr/super-star-trek
another one from SDF:
https://git.sdf.org/anthonyg/super-startrek.git
Stories like these make me want to give modernizing vtrek another try. I'd originally played it on my cousin's 3B2 in the late 1980s after being introduced to the CP/M port of classic trek, which I played on my family's IMS 5000SX. (Oh, how I wished at the time that we'd gotten an Apple II! But that's a story for another time.) I have distinct memories of playing vtrek on my dad's VT220, dialed into my cousin's BBS over Tymenet at 1200 baud. Whereas classic trek, having been written in the era of the ASR-33, was line-oriented like a text adventure, vtrek was a full-screen interactive terminal app, like vi. You'd issue movement commands using the 3x3 block of keys of the left side of the keyboard—Q, W, E, etc. Other keys controlled the ship's scanners, shields, weapons, and warp drive. Those inputs drove the game's event loop and updated the display accordingly. It was great fun, especially for a video game starved kid like me. I was forever pestering friends and cousins to play on their Ataris or Nintendos or Apples or Tandys. I didn't get my hands on a proper gaming computer until the early 90s, when we replaced the 5000SX with a 386.
So I'm sure you can imagine my excitement when I stumbled across an archive containing XENIX ports of a bunch of Unix games, including vtrek. (Thank you, Vince!) I'm not even sure how I managed to find that. Nowadays, Google only returns two search results for vtrek, the XENIX game port archive and a munged version of the original release to net.sources.games, and that's only if you know to include the "duncel" insult the game uses in the search terms. Google Groups searches of net.sources.games will lead you to a series of posts from the fall of 1985, but how would anyone other than an old fuddy duddy like me even know to look there? (Also, Google Groups doesn't have the original Usenet posts, so formatting is all screwed up. It's a vexing problem for the modern programmer archeologist.) Now imagine, if you will, an eager and not inexperienced nerd trying to compile a System V-era game on Linux and FreeBSD circa 2005. This Star Trek quote seems appropriate:
PAIN!
I mean, even the Real Hackers back in 1985 had problems getting it to compile, so I don't know why I thought my experience would be anything other than worse. The termios code in glibc just didn't work. At all. Neither did the sgtty code, which had been broken since at least 4.4BSD. After a good long while beating my head against vtrek, even going so far as to trying to build it on OpenStep 4.2 (from 1997) and FreeBSD 2.0 (from 1994), I gave up. Maybe it's time to give it another go for nostalgia's sake.
The 1985 release per Google Groups:
https://groups.google.com/g/net.sources.games/search?q=vtrek
For an example of how Google Groups screws up posts, here's a patch to vtrek:
https://usenet.trashworldnews.com/?thread=241631
And here's Google's version:
https://groups.google.com/g/net.sources.games/c/Rx_u0q5V5iE/...
The XENIX port (thanks again, Vince!):
https://svn.so-much-stuff.com/svn/trunk/cvs/trunk/games.d/vt...
Hints at how I might get vtrek to work:
https://comp.unix.programmer.narkive.com/KP4z3Ge2/problem-wi...
God bless Thomas Dickey, who's been maintaining vttest this whole time!
https://invisible-island.net/vttest/
Author of the article here, I encourage you to do so, and share the results!
I started this journey in 2006, doing the same as you, crawling old usenet archives in the newsgroups interface taht groups.google.com provided. Finding the code was troublesome, because I lost track of it, when moving from floppy disks, to different storage systems, until it has finally been preserved on github.
I find it fascinating that your father had a VT220, did he have it at home or in his office. I thought that kind of terminals were more like a thing of labs.
Regarding that VT220, I misremembered. My dad's workplace loaned him a 1200-baud modem and a C. Itoh terminal, maybe a CIT-101 because [this picture](https://terminals-wiki.org/wiki/index.php/File:C._Itoh_CIT-1...) matches my memory. He was a software engineer and occasionally worked from home.
We also has a Wyse 50 terminal. It's how we used the IMS 5000SX, which had both a 10-MB hard disk drive (I think it was called a Winchester) and a 5.25" floppy disk drive. I have a huge stash of 5.25-inch floppy diskettes from back then, including copies of TurboDOS (for the 5000SX) and Apple II games and little BASIC programs us kids wrote, but I've all but given up on recovering anything. The IMS 5000SX and the Wyse 50 terminal are long dead and buried. I've made some half-hearted attempts to boot TurboDOS up under simh, but it isn't the same. If they aren't all corrupt, I suspect my Apple diskettes have a virus of some kind on them, too.
Around 1991-1992, I helped a dentist install an electronic medical record system using a multi-user DOS variant called PC-MOS. We connected Link MC5 terminals via serial to a 386 running SoftDent, if I'm remembering it correctly. I got one of MC5s when that system was decommissioned. Unfortunately, I lost it in a house fire. Then, a few years later, I got another of the MC5s when the dentist was doing some housecleaning. I still have that one, and I'd use it more often if there wasn't something wonky with its serial interface's flow control that causes corrupted I/O.
interesting