1991: Trade Wars 2002 | Hacker News Reader

1991: Trade Wars 2002

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Hah, this was my jam in the day. I wrote mods and utilities, custom map generators, custom ship types, fixed a lot of bugs that cheaters would use. Stepped through the code in an assembly language debugger and reverse engineered all the data files.

One of my favorite memories was fixing a cheater's bug that was triggered by entering a negative number into a certain dialog. There were no legitimate features in the game that required negative numbers, so I figured if I could prevent the entry of all negative numbers, it would fix this bug plus any similar undiscovered ones. I was very much an assembly language novice, but I knew that somewhere in that executable had to be the routine that parsed ASCII strings to convert them to integers, and it most likely had the minus sign (ASCII value 45) encoded as a constant. I stubbornly changed each byte value 45 to 255 until I found the right one. Since it wasn't possible to enter ASCII 255 in the dialogs... bug fixed!

When Gary Martin finally released a new version (2112?), the executables and data files were all encrypted, so we couldn't make custom ships anymore. I wasn't able to crack the encryption but I wrote a "TSR" (=terminate and stay resident -- DOS's approximation of multi-tasking) that would wait for the Trade Wars program to unpack itself and then write patches directly into the RAM. Good times.

Sometimes I miss the days before protected memory.

TradeWars 2002 is alive and well! Star Killer's server is probably my favorite place to play:

http://www.oregonsouth.com/ice9/

Tools like TWXProxy and Mombot still see frequent updates:

https://github.com/MicroBlaster/TWXProxy

SWATH, despite its age, works great (nowadays I use it for very simple macros and as a front end to TWXProxy):

http://swath.net/

Tournament-level play is incredible. Deep strategy, full automation. You definitely do not warp around willy-nilly unless you want a planet full of photon missiles and quasar cannons dropped on your head. Sure, the ANSI graphics means you have to use your imagination a little more than in EVE, but if anything, that makes it _more_ fun for me.

> You definitely do not warp around willy-nilly unless you want a planet full of photon missiles and quasar cannons dropped on your head.

Oh, god. Don't remind me. I'm there, happily minding my own business, trading between ports in adjacent systems, and in warps a volcanic class planet with a level 6 citadel. Fucking death stars.

You wanna blast me, a hapless newb who stumbled into your territory, out of the sky, fine. But running the interdictor generator is just being mean about it. :P

Yeah, I love TW and always have: sometimes it's fun to play on the lower turns/day servers just so the botters don't jump out to such a huge lead.

I found awk for DOS on a BBS, and used it to help my TW play. When getting into a newly generated map, I'd spend the first night or two moving around as much as possible, logging the session in the terminal program (ProComm?).

Then I'd run the log through an awk script to print out a map.

OMG. I hosted a BBS with TW2002 and purchased the license way back when. It's still available from the original author: https://eisonline.classictw.com/

It looks like a lot of sites are still hosting it. On man, so many memories of the BBS days.

Minor correction, the original author (Gary Martin) sold the rights to TW2002 to the current owner/developer (John Pritchett) in 1998.

Edit: actually it was 2000. Wikipedia mistakenly says 1998, but that was when John first got involved in the project.

What fond memories I have of playing and hosting a TW2002 (and BRE) BBS in the early 90's. I find though, trying to revisit those fond memories is a mistake, they never live up to the original experience because the world has evolved, and so have I.

I would love to read an article about BRE and SRE. :)

It talked about combat not being real-time and it was turn based but it could be multi-player. It had text pretend radio channels, corporations and you could be online at the same time hunting or being hunted by other players. You could track people back to their bases with limpet mines and use fighter destruction reports to find occupied space. It was glorious and I used it to measure ever game I played after. BRE, SRE, Food fight, LORD and MajorMud are other favorites.

Originally (TW2002 v1, early 90s) the game actually only allowed a single player at a time. Most hobby boards only had a single phone line anyway, so this wasn't an unusual restriction compared to other bbs doorgames of the time.

The first "multi-node" (simultaneous player) version was the MajorBBS/WorldGroup port of the game in the mid 90s. These BBS's were typically pay-to-access since they had many phone lines... not to mention the bbs software and games were way more expensive for the sysop to purchase.

The normal doorgame version (non-mbbs/wg) eventually had multi-node support too, but not until the late 90s. I vividly remember being blown away when this came out :) Most normal doorgames didn't offer this level of real-time interactive gameplay, as it wasn't easy to implement correctly in the confines of a 16bit DOS application. Each player had their own process running, and the door author had to figure out coordination/locking/IPC using just a few primitives such as shared files.

Man. I used to play the heck out of Tradewars back in the day on local BBSes.

I distinctly remember logging in one day on a certain BBS I played on only to realize one of my corporation partners had robbed the corporation blind and left us all floating in space.

But getting betrayed and then becoming a fugitive from your former partner, and then plotting your comeback, was all part of the game ...and ultimately fun in it's own right I suppose. :) Good times.

I've been working on a version of TW2002 in Go for awhile now. What I keep getting stuck on is the economics! Does anyone have any thoughts on how the calculations work as far as supply/demand and prices between ports? I've got a really naive implementation now, but i'd like something as close to the original as possible.

Similar question for combat stuff, but I haven't gotten that far in my build yet...

Well, this a nostalgic article for me.

I first started dialing into bulletin boards as a tween, on a 386 (and later a 486) cobbled together from bits scrounged from garage sales and the e-waste from the various businesses of my parent's friends or friends of friends. I eventually came into an 8-bit ISA modem, and upon recognizing what it was, added it into my computer, and snuck a telephone cable from an open jack into my room. I found the BBS listings in a local computer magazine and and started dialing out, exploring my area code. To be honest, I don't recall how I got the terminal program I initially used; I just recall that it was bare-bones and kinda janky. As a kid, you bet your sweet ass I went straight for the games section if there was one. And there I discovered TW:2002 and Legend Of the Red Dragon.

The sysop of one of the boards I dialed into noticed I was connecting at 2400bps at a time when 28.8k and 33.6 were commonplace. He pulled me into sysop chat to ask what was up and I explained my situation with my computer being cobbled together from scrap. He offered to send me a newer modem as well as some terminal software that didn't suck, and so I gave him my mailing address. I don't recall if I got my parents' permission to do so. In either case, a week or so later package showed up in the mail with a 16-bit ISA 14.4k modem and a floppy disk with a terminal program that indeed didn't suck. And with connection speeds that didn't cause a full screen of ANSI art take minutes to load, line by painful line, TradeWars became much more playable.

I logged many hours in TW:2002 through middle school and early high school. The holy grail I heard about, but initially couldn't play, were those really fancy BBSes that had multiple lines and the latest version that let you play against other players at the same time. Those were fancier operations where you had to pay monies for your dial-in time, which was not a particularly feasible thing when you're not even old enough to have a job, much less a bank account. It until wasn't towards the end of high school when I found a few sites offering connections over telnet that I got to experience multi-player play. And promptly learned just how bad of a player I'd been all that time.

A back-burnered project still intend to get to is to set up a retro system to run a multi-line (or maybe even network connected!) BBS, with all the various classic games of that era, including TW:2002.

It was quite common back then for BBSes to require your phone number and home address as part of the signup process. I don't remember anyone finding this unusual or complaining about it. Then again, people wrote into computer magazines and were fine with their addresses being published if they were seeking others with the same computer to contact them. The scene in general was very high trust. Even the pirate and phreak communities were generally trusting of members.

People who have fond memories of playing Trade Wars when they were younger should check out EVE Online (https://www.eveonline.com/)

There are enough similarities that I would find it hard to believe that EVE Online was not, at the very least, influenced by Trade Wars.

a spreadsheet and corporate espionage simulator masquerading as a spaceship video game...

I recall this game as a "door" from a dial-up BBS. I spent part of a summer building my empire and then dialed in one day to find that it had been attacked and destroyed. I was pretty depressed about that so I wrote a note to the sysop (a guy I knew and worked with). My note was about sportsmanship and good will, and how the destruction of my empire did not represent those values. I asked the sysop to please pass on the note to the other player. The terse response that I got back from the sysop was; "Your message was properly addressed."

Reading this brought back so many good memories.

Empire on C64, tradewars and global war (risk) were so much fun back in the golden age of BBses.

Funny coincidence as I was searching exactly tradewars on my ipad a week ago to see if there was something similar. I’m being nostalgic nowadays, if someone has any suggestions for android or iOS games, store searches are usually not returning small gems.

I still remember one particular game in the mid-90s where there was basically a corporation of several "evil" players vs. me and another "good" player. We eventually played to a stalemate where neither side was going to get a clear victory.

I played so much of this in my youth, I remember finding an awesome helper programs that would help you keep track of the discovered universe, build maps, and keep track of good trading routes.

Anyone remember Telemate and the macros it supported? So great for connecting to BBSes and playing games like TW2002

What a great game. A modern version that kept the simple and pvp nature of the original game would be cool.

The great thing about TW2002 is that it was simple on the surface, which made it accessible. You could have fun warping around, trading goods, but then eventually you'd start digging and find the incredible depth in the game. The first time I stumbled on the Starbase blew my mind, and it just kept on going from there. Getting a Federal Commission (or going evil), terraforming planets, building citadels, finding dead ends in space to set up your planet, setting up corporations...

Oh man, I mentioned the time limits in my other comment. But citadels and stuff took sooooo long. Depending on your setup, it could be months until everything was built up. I remember impatiently checking the countdown on my citadels (28 days, 27 days, 26 days,...)

And now I'm going to have to set it up in docker again.. I only remember some of that.

One aspect of TW that I feel would be missing from any modern reincarnation would be the time limit you usually had on a BBS. Only being able to play for a set time a day is basically unheard of now. But it made you want to play it all the more, and I couldn't wait until the next morning when my time allotment was refreshed :)

I kind of wish this was true nowadays. I don't have hours and hours to play anymore, and so tend to avoid multiplayer online since the playing field is heavily tilted to those who have lots of time to play. That was somewhat less of an issue in the BBS days (on my BBS, anyway).

(Plus, a BBS might also periodically delete the universe and start over (a big bang!) which would again level the playing field for a bit.

Edit: Just remembered, in addition to the time limit on the BBS, you also had a specified number of 'turns' in the game. So you really had to plan sometimes. (and bigger ships took more turns to move per sector...)

LOL yeah if I recall I'd have different accounts (I think that was frowned upon?) and play on different BBSes to get my 'hit' :)

I'd remember the days getting stuck in the middle of no where when I'm out of turns and you hope no one comes across you and attack you.

I was in middle school/high school when I played this game...and I'd tie up the house line. Even if I had no turns somethings I'd hang around and chat on the conference with people.

I played a lot on the BBS Family Entertainment (Fament?) I believe...I think that group is still playing and Cruncher is still pretty involved and hosts games.

> I kind of wish this was true nowadays. I don't have hours and hours to play anymore, and so tend to avoid multiplayer online since the playing field is heavily tilted to those who have lots of time to play.

Have you considered EVE Online? So many aspects of playing is your character carrying out processes and awaiting countdowns for hours and days – months even, even when you're away.

Lived in TW2002 on Atlantis BBS for the better part of 2 years. Good times.

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