> the authors couldn’t afford to build a sloppy, wasteful UI, and so by modern standards the game UI is remarkably fast and responsive. They don’t make ‘em like they used to.

I also miss this aspect of old windows games. "Castle of the Wind" the RPG is another example of a game that unashamedly uses Windows' built-in UI elements just fine. I wish more games just stuck to them. Then things like pressing tab to cycle focus to different UI elements still works and developers wouldn't have to worry about introducing bugs in their custom UIs.

Wow, Stars! I loved this game so much as a child. Back then, after upgrading from shareware I had to wait for a floppy disk to arrive in the mail.

I forget whether it was steam or GE-Proton I ran it under but ran just fine on Linux. Have to say, I did crash out after 40 turns though, which is ridiculous, after thinking so much about Stars! for so long.

News here: there's an MCP server!! Oh snap!! This is great. I really love the idea of games that have external interfaces. There's a ton of tiny macro to stars, and being able to say, get every warship in the sector over to that planet at the same time with efficient fuel usage would be a lovely awesome thing to watch happen.

I look forward to more and more games having MCP (or other external interfaces). I'm sure there's others out there already, but definitely happy to see Stars! pointing the way forward yet again, decades latter.

The star map screenshot looks very similar to star map in "Remnants of the Precursors" [1], which is a modernization of 1993 "Master of Orion" [2]. Convergent evolution, or was 1995 Stars! an homage/clone of Orion?

1. https://rayfowler.itch.io/remnants-of-the-precursors

2. https://store.steampowered.com/app/410970/Master_of_Orion_1/

A pity Supernova was never finished. Stars! Without all the Econ micromanagement would have gotten rid of one of the bigger mechanical advantages someone with a lot of patience had.

I kind of wish i had tried this when i was younger, but VGA Planets got hold of me first and teenage me apparently had stupid video game tribalism

I loved this game back in the day and was looking for a way to play it just last month! I will definitely be trying this.

I loved stars! and really wish that it gets reimagined for the modern age. Stellaris gets way too micro-managing to be fun IMHO.

Really cool effort but it might be better to just document the game mechanics really well, reimplement an open source version and then use it as a base to improve it, OpenTTD style. Stars! was fun for the day but had a lot of frustrating problems as well, in particular how much effort it required to complete a turn in the later stages due to the lack of automation features. And of course some nicer graphics wouldn't go amiss.

The hard part is knowing why exactly it was compelling despite apparently violating all the rules of good game design...

Very neat! I hope we'll see more of this kind of work. Most games are well-behaved enough to simply run in Dosbox, an emulator, or through Wine, but there are a few tough nuts there that either need a very specific config, or just actual hardware. Having a known good config wrapped up in a VM seems like a great solution.