Habitat – a massively multiplayer online role-playing game for the Commodore 64 | Hacker News Reader

Habitat – a massively multiplayer online role-playing game for the Commodore 64

github.com

130 pointshitr24 comments

I wondered what this looked like. I found a promo video (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VVpulhO3jyc) and some apparently VCR-recorded gameplay (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KTtIzLZGNLw).

There are some interesting notes in the file at https://github.com/Museum-of-Art-and-Digital-Entertainment/h... re: architecture.

The repository should really mention the origin of the source code and the license. I'm always a bit skeptical about the legality of ancient source code suddenly popping up.

The origin is mentioned in their blog post. Very nice that Fujitsu has given the rights to release the source code. There are still parts missing, so let's hope that AOL will be as generous.

https://themade.org/posts/1701

I'd be surprised if AOL still had the qlink code sitting around in an easily accessible format. I think that's more of an issue than the legal problems.

Legal is the problem. They have the code. We've confirmed that fact.

Hey gang, I'm the guy behind the MADE. I'm available to answer any specific Habitat questions you may have. Additionally, we're in #made on Freenode, where we frequently discuss ancient computers. Feel free to drop in if you have any thoughts or questions about the project.

What we really need is to start talking to AOL legal about QLink code, as we know they have the code, we just need to get it into a form we can publicly preserve. That means legal chatter time.

Don't miss out on the lessons as well: http://web.stanford.edu/class/history34q/readings/Virtual_Wo...

Reading the stories here shows how deep and rich the interactions between the players and the world were. It's basically a very retro Second Life; the original, in fact. Amazing achievement, and really funny seeing developers not 'cheat' to deal with their own mistakes and failures (e.g. trading Death's one-shot kill gun for money in a town square after Death was killed and dropped that gun, because he forgot to heal).

Lessons from Habitat is one of my preferred papers of all times. I discovered for the first time in the 90's [1], and re-read many times over the years, and it still impresses me how much they achieved with such low-tech.

[1] I wasn't a user, but read about it in connection with Snow Crash, another fascinating read http://www.verbalworkout.com/ub/ub130/ub13002028.htm

I would love to see what a new edition of this Stanford course would present. That site was from 1998. Technology-mediated virtual worlds have grown quite a bit since. :)

There's a great tech transfer doc here that describes the game mechanics:

https://themade.org/posts/732

And another post about the compiler used for Habitat:

http://sdtimes.com/sd-times-blog-macross-6502-on-github/

Thanks for the link to The MADE's site. They've got a post on the open-sourcing of Habitat, too: https://themade.org/posts/1701

Club Caribe. For people of a certain age... which is much older than the average HN reader, this was the pixellated magic of the internet. Your friends at school didn't even believe you when you tried to tell them about it.

Yep I visited it a couple times - I recall the rampant head hunting going on.

Great reminder for the early lessons on social media, which didn't really changed since: http://www.shirky.com/writings/herecomeseverybody/group_enem...

I thought this might be a modern MMO for the C64.

I remember reading about this "game" in a Danish computer magazine back in the 80's. Wanted to play it really bad, but of course there was no Internet back then, so it wasn't possible.

For people who also don't know anything about it here is a video explaining a little about it https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VVpulhO3jyc

Neat, I counted 240 bytes on their zero page reserved for application state. They had 16 high speed bytes left for future expansion.

https://github.com/Museum-of-Art-and-Digital-Entertainment/h...

Addresses 0 and 1 are reserved for I/O on the 6510.

Oh really? What kind of I/O? Something in my foggy memory said that first word there was used to control bank switching on the GeoRam memory expansion unit.

6 I/O pins are exposed, the first three bits are used for bank switching, the second three are for datasette control.

https://www.c64-wiki.com/index.php/Bank_Switching#Expansion_...

https://www.c64-wiki.com/index.php/Cassette_Port

a cursory google search shows that apparently qlink has been reverse engineered ( http://orrtech.us/qlink/index.html ). I wonder if this would help them...

further google-fu shows https://github.com/ssalevan/qlink and https://github.com/jasmaz/qlink but it looks like http://www.lyonlabs.org/commodore/qlink/ they really do need the original qlink software to continue the work

We use QLink Reloaded, and Jasmaz is in our IRC channel to help. The issue is that QLink uses a really byzantine system of communication with the server, where it's constantly going"57, 26, 23" and each of those numbers means a very distinct function. No one has a clue what those numbers mean, so QLink Reloaded is basically only the bits that could be reverse engineered in this black box situation.

We have modified QLink Reloaded for our purposes, though.

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