Alto Trek | Hacker News Reader

Alto Trek

en.wikipedia.org

110 pointsnanna25 comments

Oh my god, this must have inspired NetTrek, one of the earliest networked Macintosh games that worked over AppleTalk:

http://retroweb.maclab.org/articles/Online-Games.html

https://macintoshgarden.org/games/nettrek

https://archive.org/details/NetTrekTheRealVersionMacintosh

We played Nettrek on unix workstations at my college. Basically filled up the labs at night doing so on a Friday and Saturday nights back in the early '90s.

What's interesting is that different servers had different styles of games. One was more like hockey, using tractor beams to pull the puck around the playing field.

To some extent, I still miss this. The gaming was simple enough, and easy to kind of get into.

https://www.netrek.org/

Yes! As soon as I saw it I recognized it... hours of playing after school in the computer lab on the Mac SE/30s ;)

Those were my first networked gaming experiences along with Risk, which we also played using a physical game board. Those are good days.

The "black and white Mac" implementation of Risk made it such a breeze to play that I could barely tolerate the physical setup and teardown of the actual board game after it.

To this day I'm still looking for a good large electronic game-board touchscreen. (I know there have been some stabs at this... PlayTable?)

Netrek made its way onto PCs also and I remember playing it in probably 1994/95 when it was about the only game our crappy rural DSL could handle. Tons of fun and the requirement for strategic teamwork was probably only rivaled by RTS games.

And it reminds me of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decwar (which was based on ... which was based on ...), which was played on a timesharing system. It was fairly well known back then, so I wouldn't be surprised if Alto Trek was inspired by it. I played DECwar once, at night, because only then all the terminals were free, and the operator could run this game.

http://decwars.com

It may still work... Still loading over here...

"Alto Trek (in the Alto's 606×808 portrait ratio screen)"

That's higher than I would've expected for the time. That's more than half as many pixels as a Switch screen. I was born 11 years after this and I remember using 800x600 as my main desktop resolution.

On that note, anyone know of the reason for the weird resolution of 808x606 instead of a more round number like 600x800?

I can only find this document:

"The display controller handles transfers between the main memory and the CRT. The CRT is a standard 875 line raster-scanned TV monitor, refreshed at 60 fields per second from a bit map in main memory. The CRT contains 606 points horizontally, and 808 points vertically, or 489,648 points total"

https://bitsavers.org/pdf/xerox/alto/Alto_Hardware_Manual_Au...

which explains more detail but doesn't really explain how they arrived at those numbers. I assume it's something to do with vblanking or something but I don't understand it.

I don’t remember exactly but it probably had to do with the logic speed back in those days. The cpu updated screen memory with BitBLT (an operation copied from the PDP-10, hence the name) and the screen was allocated 2/3 (!!) of the memory bus speed. So they ran the logic as fast as they could and that was how many dots they could afford.

Remember the Alto was the origin of bitmapped displays.

Alto was the /popularization/ of bitmapped displays (In the public mind). Other examples predate it such as the PLATO computer system.

I was briefly addicted to this.

If you put a base in every star system, you won. The trick was not to fight anyone while you were doing it.

The UI looks surprisingly understandable/usable, even by modern standards.

I'm thinking that this might be due to the proliferation of awful and overminimalistic design, so we are more tolerant towards those things.

You had shields, which used energy. Photon torpedoes and phasars, which also did.

A base would recharge your energy. You could rotate and accelerate. Hit a gateway at high speed and you jumped to another star system.

That's it. You could lay a base down way far away from the gateway, so people wouldn't see it (my trick)

Rochester must have had a nice early computer graphics lab ;)

https://www.museumofplay.org/press-release/the-strong-receiv...

Maybe the CS/Math department did. Sadly, I never heard of us creating this cool game.

I remember in 1989 or 1990 wanting to play NetTrek, but the only machines capable of playing it were in a locked room that you needed to know about in order to reserve a seat.

I visited a friend at CMU and there were large X-window capable workstations everywhere. I was a tad jealous.

Haha in my university something similar happened to me - One day I saw high res screens running OpenDX and I was hooked on simulations after that!

First time I heard of Microsoft Allegiance, linked from there: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allegiance_(video_game) - especially cool of MS to re-license it as MIT for the community, I wish more cool people like that still worked at MS.

This must have been a blast BITD! I can only imagine.

I wonder if it was easy to cheat since all the network traffic seems to have been (at least potentially) visible to all peers, if I understand correctly. Maybe it spawned the first instance of cheat bots too.

> BITD

For the sake of comprehensibility:

"back in the day"

Good call. Thanks.

I believe this also inspired mtrek, which was an implementation played over telnet.

https://mtrek.com/

Alto means "high" in Spanish, so indeed it's pretty appropiate for a game like this. Well, relatively to the floor, once you are in space, there's no "high" :).

That and mazewar got a lot of cycles at PARC.

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