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Comment by bee_rider | Hacker News Reader

I wonder what the reason for calling out the fact that it could be run on a Pi is. MUDs are not new, of course, so I guess they’ve been run on some very weak machines.

But, the license file seems to be 11 years old… I guess those older Pi’s are pretty weak.

Still slightly confused but less so.

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Even the oldest rPIs are more than tenthousand times more powerful than what you'd need to run a MUD. Pretty much anything that can run a telnet server users could do useful stuff with could also run a MUD. This is written in python, so it probably needs slightly more power than that though.

Most likely this is just a case of awkward English - the intended use of the project is to be run on a rPI. It's not a minimum requirement.

Color me suspicious. I ran a MUD back in 2005 that we opted not to add features to because of how CPU intensive they were.

Obviously if you took gamma diku and tossed it on an rpi, yeah, because that was built in the '80s with that hardware in mind. But muds evolve and get features and people come up with stuff that can't be ran on ancient hardware.

For example, most MUDs turn(ed) off mobile AI when players weren't in the zone. It wasn't strictly necessary to have it on, but it would be nice to have NPCs that did stuff when PCs weren't around so when they revisit something happened.

I'd be suspicious too if I said any mud rather than a mud. That MUDs have been run on much weaker hardware is a fact.

Also I didn't write that in a vacuum, I wrote that as a response to a comment which establishes the context you are to understand my statements in.

Still seems confusing to me. MUDs were run on much weaker hardware than that even.

Definitely. I ran a MUD on a Sun Sparcstation with 32 megs of RAM back in the mid 90's. (The MUD only used a fraction of that, of course.)

That's similar to what Discworld MUD ran on back then, although that needed frequent MUD reboots to keep the MUD and server somewhat useable (every 45 minutes or so). Today it is on a 8GB VM and only reboots for bigger game updates. We're looking at moving it onto a PI5. The added bloat can no longer keep up with hardware getting better :)

Perhaps it's just meant to signal: Anyone can run this, hackers welcome!

Most people don't run servers. RPi is seen as the way to run servers at home for most people.

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