Posted by mwheeler 11/9/2025
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:
Thanks for the links. I couldn't quite tell if that was a text game like bsdgames trek, or a curses game like Rogue.
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.
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.
To make it playable singleplayer on a keyboard with no keypad: http://canonical.org/~kragen/sw/dev3/xevil
The thing is that list is not constant and is changing overtime, depending on the usage, demand, and effort to maintain them from the debian maintainers.
I am wondering if such a collection, no matter the license, and no matter the status of the codebase is maintained somewhere (for specific unix/bsd/linux text based games)
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!
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.
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.
I started getting old computers back in the day, even a bulky IBM with AS/400, featuring a PowerPC RISC architecture, although it worked, and I learned how to login and all, I donated it to a friend that have a garage full of all kind of machines, that probably could preserve it better than me.
Regarding, the apple diskettes with virus, probably they are nowadays worth preserving too (for some archeological sleuthing) :D Thanks for sharing this story.!
OTOH, Trek for the ZMachine issues hotkeys for the both LRS and LRS.
System V trek it's at GH, but I find it's pretty much the same as BSD trek(6) from OpenBSD.
