Posted by mwheeler 14 hours ago
Are they also covered by these? Anyone remember a flight simulator with wireframe graphics available Unices?
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.
Btw the game hunt with destructable regrowing mazes is still being distributed in the bsd-games package today.
Empire was responsible for a lot of 5th year seniors back in the 80.
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
However, I saw a modern-ish decendent called Empire Deluxe, so maybe the original had more features?
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.
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.
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
Conquer-web looks for avoiding the "problem" to connect to a server with putty/telnet or ssh through a terminal. You can just connect from the web.
I can´t provide a URL to try, because I want to provide some security measures, and create a proper world, before opening something like this, but the code is there.