Reviving Classic Unix Games: A 20-Year Journey Through Software Archaeology | Hacker News Reader

Reviving Classic Unix Games: A 20-Year Journey Through Software Archaeology

vejeta.com

176 pointsmwheeler81 comments

We’re hitting that point in time when key figures in the history of early computing are starting to leave us. It’s nice to see these early applications preserved. If we can get this code off old disks and tapes and into modern cloud-based repositories, with open source licenses, we might be able to enjoy these programs for a long time, whether for actual amusement or just historical significance. The digital age is both a blessing and a curse in that so much information can be moved around so easily, but a lot of it is locked away on obsolete media that will eventually decay.

Someone should start a museum where you can walk in and play these ancient games and fiddle with ancient software (probably using virtual machines and emulators for the sake of hardware preservation). They could use donations and admission tickets to fund the restoration of more and more old stuff, in a virtuous cycle.

It is my very strong opinion that brits excel at museums.

https://www.computinghistory.org.uk/

https://www.tnmoc.org/

https://www.museumofcomputing.org.uk/

No doubt, but one could also argue that the UK is oversupplied with computer museums and other regions are undersupplied =)

Love that a term from Vinge has almost entered our lexicon. The author is a "programmer archeologist".

Coming soon: AI models archeologists

I think we'll get AI model psychiatrists first.

    “The wonder of it—the horror of it, Sura said—was that unlike the useless wrecks of Canberra’s past, these programs still worked! And via a million million circuitous threads of inheritance, many of the oldest programs still ran in the bowels of the Qeng Ho system. Take the Traders’ method of timekeeping. The frame corrections were incredibly complex—and down at the very bottom of it was a little program that ran a counter. Second by second, the Qeng Ho counted from the instant that a human had first set foot on Old Earth’s moon. But if you looked at it still more closely…the starting instant was actually about fifteen million seconds later, the 0-second of one of Humankind’s first computer operating systems.”

Nice to see this happening, FWIW:

I uploaded a very old Star Trek Game I think from 1973. I got it from the Coherent OS people. You can get it by issuing these commands:

curl 'gopher://sdf.org/0/users/jmccue/repository/trek-73.tar.gz' -o trek-73.tar.gz

curl 'gopher://sdf.org/0/users/jmccue/repository/trek-73.tar.gz.asc' -o trek-73.tar.gz.asc

and my gpg key in case you want to validate the download:

curl 'gopher://sdf.org/0/users/jmccue/jmcsdf.asc' -o jmcsdf.asc

Trek lives in every OpenBSD install. And OFC with any Basic interpreter running the original game. I translated a Zmachine port into Spanish, too. ZTrek.

Is it Trek or Super Star Trek?

https://github.com/philspil66/Super-Star-Trek

https://gamicus.fandom.com/wiki/BSD_Trek

Hey Anthk, if you ported it to a Zmachine, does it mean is it like an interactive fiction game (aventura conversacional in spanish). Is it in the CAAD archive?

No is not a text adventure game; it just runs under the ZMachine. You have several other examples at IFDB, such as Tetris, Robots Find Kitten, Madbomber... I did internally as a translation at https://caja.texto-plano.xyz/anthk/zgames/spa/trek/ in order to provide a quick translated Trek game. Yes, I could use some Basic SST port but this made the game universally playable. It isn't a IF game because it doesn't use the INFSP6 Spanish grammar (the counterpart to the English Inform6 one). That's it, it uses raw Inform instructions.

The game is not at CAAD because they woudn't accept as it a text adventure game.

Cool. Thanks for sharing it! I am going to play. Regarding instructions, I will find my way, but other less computer savvy users might need a README there. See you in USENET!

You can use Frotz or anything else, and as for the help, it's builtin both in Spanish and English per game edition.

https://www.ifarchive.org/if-archive/games/zcode/ztrek.z5 English version.

For instance: frotz ztrek.z5

Or Winfrotz under Windows, or Lectrote for any OS.

By pressing '9' you get the online help, in any language. Have fun.

Hey John, I tried your build, just out of curiosity, something worth preserving too. I noticed it when compiling that the code also needed to be modernized, the same thing I had to do for conquer for the gpl-release.

I read in a comment below that work was already done, isn´t?

There use to be a set of games which were available for SunOS and may be Solaris, including a flight simulator with wired frame graphics, and Sun even had released a book about these games at that time(may be early 1990's).

Are they also covered by these? Anyone remember a flight simulator with wireframe graphics available Unices?

ACM, Sabre?

It doesn't seem to be that widely known, any reason why?

Hello, I am the author of the article. I did not know of those games you mention at the time. We used to play conquer at the AIX (Unix) that our computer labs provided for all the alumni. I have only tracked conquer's authors to obtain their permissions to relicense and preserve in a way that others could study and build upon.

"The Book of Unix Games" by Janice Winsor is the book. Seems hard to find now.

I bought a copy of Aviator by Curt Priem and Bruce Factor, that ran on my SS2 pizzabox's GX "LEGO: Low End Graphics Option" SBus card (an 8 bit color + 2 bits monochrome overlay plane graphics accelerator):

https://www.techmonitor.ai/hardware/aviator_15_for_sun_netwo...

>AVIATOR 1.5 FOR SUN NETWORKS OPENS UP GRAPHICS WORKSTATION GAMES MARKET. By CBR Staff Writer, 08 Jul 1991.

https://forums.sgi.sh/index.php?threads/aviator-a-flight-sim...

https://bitsavers.org/bits/Sun/aviator/

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4RQscDJCy4c

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44049987

>Bruce Factor and Curtis Priem developed a flight simulator called Aviator for Sun's S-Bus GX graphics accelerator. I had one of them on my SS2, and owned a copy of Aviator on CDROM, and loved to play it. [...]

When I was a kid, early 80s, my mom's job had bought some IBM computer. Not PCs, but some kind of large computer in a room to help with accounting / book keeping. Terminals with green text screens were attached to this computer. They had text based menus, and somewhere in this menu system, there were games. One game was a kind of horse race I remember, where digits were racing from left to right on the screen. Another was probably a lunar lander, but memory is lacking. Can someone tell from this description what kind of computer this was, and what OS it was running?

IBM System/34, System/36, or System/38 perhaps? Those are IBM's minicomputers available in that timeframe.

System/34 or System/36, the game was RACE. Here you go: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mYRuTHz-wwk

Yes, that is how it looked like! Such nostalgia

Unfamiliar but probably System/34 or System/36 running SSP (System Support Program) with IBM 5250 series terminals.

Unsure about the games. Here’s an early lunar lander:

https://www.cs.brandeis.edu/~storer/LunarLander/LunarLander....

Another Lunar version:

https://undefinedvalue.com/lunar-for-c-and-rust.html

System/36 guide:

https://archive.org/details/bitsavers_ibmsystem3rogrammingWi...

Possible source for games in David H. Ahl in his book 101 BASIC Computer Games.

How were the contributions by Richard Caley handled? "The legal reality was harsh: Richard’s contributions to Conquer couldn’t be relicensed. The university couldn’t help contact heirs due to privacy laws."

The notion that everything had to be relicensed under the GPL “so it could be properly preserved and packaged for modern Linux distributions” seems pretty silly.

Only if you haven‘t dealt with licenses. This software was published without a license.

It's a wonder the software's authors, users, and distributors have evaded dire legal consequences all these decades.

It's a ticking time bomb that distributors are steering clear of for good reason. You are correct that current copyright law is pretty silly, but that silly law is frequently enforced by serious courts.

Author of the article here. Richard's contributions remain in the codebase but under original terms. We documented his legacy as a person, and that is explained in the README of the repository.

Before xtrek and eventually netrek, there was hunt: https://techtinkering.com/2009/08/11/my-top-10-classic-text-... you might think that games back then were slow but this one was fast paced mayhem. using the vi commands was perfect.

Talking about netrek, I read that it originated in a game called Empire on PLATO (not the one played on rec.games.empire). I wonder if this game be played somehow these days?

Btw the game hunt with destructable regrowing mazes is still being distributed in the bsd-games package today.

Empire was a blast. Top players instinctively knew how ships would move and would key in commands much much faster than the display would update. One second you are in orbit, the next refresh you are dead and the planet has been taken.

Empire was responsible for a lot of 5th year seniors back in the 80.

Interesting. Netrek ran at 10 fps (or rather, 10 refreshes of player coordinates), nowadays I think they are moving to 60 game ticks per second (with approximate cloaked player positions getting updates less frequently of course).

You can play Empire on cyber1 [1], an emulated PLATO system.

[1] https://www.cyber1.org

Thanks!

Oh god, netrek was addictive. At 12-14, I played it a lot on the HP-UX machines when my mom had to work weekends and drag my brother and I along (very willingly) in the mid 1990s. The early internet was also accessible to us.

I wasted so much late night hours on Netrek in the computer lab.

I remember something similar from my university days (30-odd years ago) called Empire. This still lives on here [1]. There was many a map printed out on the laser printer (and my prof wanted to know why his budget was so much higher that term...) back in the day. We played against other colleges of the university of Londone over JANet, and I ran the server on a DECstation 5000, somewhat less powerful than my watch these days...

Empire has the concept of a "Bureaucratic Time Unit" which recovered to its maximum in real time every update, and was based on how many civilians (as opposed to military) you had in your capital city. I always thought that was a pretty cool idea - every operation took X BTU's, so you couldn't log on at 3am and utterly nuke another country before they woke up. 3am was still the popular time to start nuking another country, of course :)

I still remember waking up (I splurged on a 1200-baud modem rather than the standard 300-baud one) in the morning, logging in on my Atari ST before I went to college, and seeing "You have 2000 telegrams...". Oh crap. You got telegrams for lots of reasons, but one of those reasons was an attack. It was all part of the "All the news that's fit to print!" messaging system. Just like 'Diplomacy', half the game was in the interaction between people, alliances and betrayals, not just getting stat X to 100% ... [1]: http://www.wolfpackempire.com

The creator of this game is a frequent contributor on this site.

https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=WalterBright

TIL :)

Is that the same Empire? The version I've seen has no BTUs. Just basics: random continents, cities produce military units, units require different numbers of turns for production, etc.

However, I saw a modern-ish decendent called Empire Deluxe, so maybe the original had more features?

The version I played all those years ago definitely had BTUs. I remember planning ahead of time what the most efficient use of them would be, before actually doing things between updates; not to mention setting alarms to wake me up, log on, and use up the (otherwise wasted because I was at max) ones at times in the night, if I was doing something, er… sneaky :)

LOL, part of the charm of those games is what you mention, the plots behind the movements with the messages between the nations, the double games to make the other thing you were allied with someone, when in every turn maybe...you were sending troops by boat from another direction. People could enter deep into the roleplaying on those messages and that could be really fun. That was my experience with conquer :P

PS: I am the author of the article, and although I reached the university when the modems were being phased out (1994 or so), we played a lot to it while we were in the computer labs, instead of studying.

"Play-by-Mail" games could make a comeback now:

An AI could maintain the state of a world in its "mind", take text commands from a bunch of players, and update the state the next day.

AI's suck against the most simple game daemon or MUDs sendings emails over SMTP.

Slackware offers bsd-games as part of the base distribution:

https://mirrors.slackware.com/slackware/slackware64-current/...

In addition, SBo (Slackware equivalent to BSD's port system with 3rd party software) offers nbsd-games, a series of classic Unix games with a ncurses interface:

https://slackbuilds.org/repository/15.0/games/nbsdgames/

It's nice to see true classics being preserved in one of those packages.

Lots of distros should have the bsdgames package, for example Debian (and thus Ubuntu, Pop!_OS etc.): https://packages.debian.org/stable/games/bsdgames

https://inconsolation.wordpress.com/2014/10/19/conquest-much... this?

It is a different game, conquer is a multiplayer strategy game, loosely based on middle-earth atmosphere, nations could be: elves, humans, dwarves, orcs, there were npc nations too: lizards, nomads, etc. Conquer is still ncurses based, probably originating from the same times (the 80s). The original author, Ed Barlow, originally published the game in USENET, comp.sources.games, as conquest, but changed the name on the second release, when noticing there was already a game called conquest, probably this one.

Thanks for the link!

There was a Curses version of Trek called "universe" that I was obsessed with, back in the day, but I've never been able to find it again.

Classic FTP sites with UNix software don't have it. Was it for Unix?

ESR has a Python 3 port of Super Star Trek which has been enhanced a lot:

https://gitlab.com/esr/super-star-trek

another one from SDF:

https://git.sdf.org/anthonyg/super-startrek.git

I remember it being for both Unix and DOS.

Thanks for the links. I couldn't quite tell if that was a text game like bsdgames trek, or a curses game like Rogue.

Comp.souces.games was a source of delight and pain as I learned how to port software from sizeof(int) == sizeof(void *) architectures.

I often find the historical and archaeological aspects more important, this is a wonderful way to start the day.

If you like that kind of thing, you might like looking at the Angband Plus github repository: https://github.com/NickMcConnell/AngbandPlus

Angband is a roguelike that had many variants over the years, and Nick combined all of these variants into one big git repository where each variant is a branch.

The discussion of Richard Caley was warming, reminded me of Izchak Miller a little bit.

Conquer was an amazing game, I hope someone puts it online so I can pay again!

I am the author of the article. I have put a quick prototype to see how a game like this could be played from the web. And it is certainly possible. I used "ttyd" as a bridge from a shell program and show the output through websockets with apache. You can check the code in https://github.com/vejeta/conquer-web.

The game is playable through the web, with the original curses interface, you can login with your nation and play, but I want the experiment to be more "curated" by providing a proper login system, to avoid any kind of attack, although the process running conquer is in an isolated docker container. Also I want to provide the help system in the web, so people can learn to play without having to login into conquer first.

I will make it free, or anyone will be able to host their own instance. If you want to tinker, what I have it is already in https://github.com/vejeta/conquer-web

Something like what's done with https://www.hardfought.org/nethack/ maybe?

The opposite, from what I read in that page, they provide instructions to connect from the shell.

Conquer-web looks for avoiding the "problem" to connect to a server with putty/telnet or ssh through a terminal. You can just connect from the web.

I can´t provide a URL to try, because I want to provide some security measures, and create a proper world, before opening something like this, but the code is there.

Anyone here play xevil ?

I hadn't played it in a while. 12 Kills, Rank: Hell's Proctologist.

To make it playable singleplayer on a keyboard with no keypad: http://canonical.org/~kragen/sw/dev3/xevil

This was a wonderful read. I'm glad it mostly worked out.

That's pretty cool. I think it should all be bundled into scummvm, or an extension of this such as scummvm-history or scummvm-preservation. We could bundle all games ever written, with a focus on older games; and ensure they are playable (be it either by released-to-the-public, or people having privately owned copies - the point is more than an engine should be able to make them playable on a modern computer. And yes, we have hardware emulators, I get it, but I am thinking here more of making sure that the code would still work as is on any computer system really, with a focus on omdern systems.)

ScummVM doesn't work that way. It needs an engine per game engine.

Not exactly what you ask, but for example, for unix textual games, Debian (the GNU/Linux distribution I know best) provides the package called bsdgames: https://packages.debian.org/source/sid/bsdgames where many games like this are provided https://salsa.debian.org/games-team/bsdgames

The thing is that list is not constant and is changing overtime, depending on the usage, demand, and effort to maintain them from the debian maintainers.

I am wondering if such a collection, no matter the license, and no matter the status of the codebase is maintained somewhere (for specific unix/bsd/linux text based games)

BSD games are part of the base TGZ's from OpenBSD. They are perfect to test new cases (pledge, unveil...) without making dangerous experiments with core OS tools.

Reads like ChatGPT wrote it.

Yet your meticulously hand written comment is even less relevant and interesting and well researched than the article.

Author here: Not ChatGPT, but Claude helped me. I am ashamed to say that I used it to organize my ideas because all the original text and research is bigger and I used it to summarize it, but rushed publishing it before rewriting completely with my own words. I did not want to lose momentum and forget about this for 20 years again

Stories like these make me want to give modernizing vtrek another try. I'd originally played it on my cousin's 3B2 in the late 1980s after being introduced to the CP/M port of classic trek, which I played on my family's IMS 5000SX. (Oh, how I wished at the time that we'd gotten an Apple II! But that's a story for another time.) I have distinct memories of playing vtrek on my dad's VT220, dialed into my cousin's BBS over Tymenet at 1200 baud. Whereas classic trek, having been written in the era of the ASR-33, was line-oriented like a text adventure, vtrek was a full-screen interactive terminal app, like vi. You'd issue movement commands using the 3x3 block of keys of the left side of the keyboard—Q, W, E, etc. Other keys controlled the ship's scanners, shields, weapons, and warp drive. Those inputs drove the game's event loop and updated the display accordingly. It was great fun, especially for a video game starved kid like me. I was forever pestering friends and cousins to play on their Ataris or Nintendos or Apples or Tandys. I didn't get my hands on a proper gaming computer until the early 90s, when we replaced the 5000SX with a 386.

So I'm sure you can imagine my excitement when I stumbled across an archive containing XENIX ports of a bunch of Unix games, including vtrek. (Thank you, Vince!) I'm not even sure how I managed to find that. Nowadays, Google only returns two search results for vtrek, the XENIX game port archive and a munged version of the original release to net.sources.games, and that's only if you know to include the "duncel" insult the game uses in the search terms. Google Groups searches of net.sources.games will lead you to a series of posts from the fall of 1985, but how would anyone other than an old fuddy duddy like me even know to look there? (Also, Google Groups doesn't have the original Usenet posts, so formatting is all screwed up. It's a vexing problem for the modern programmer archeologist.) Now imagine, if you will, an eager and not inexperienced nerd trying to compile a System V-era game on Linux and FreeBSD circa 2005. This Star Trek quote seems appropriate:

PAIN!

I mean, even the Real Hackers back in 1985 had problems getting it to compile, so I don't know why I thought my experience would be anything other than worse. The termios code in glibc just didn't work. At all. Neither did the sgtty code, which had been broken since at least 4.4BSD. After a good long while beating my head against vtrek, even going so far as to trying to build it on OpenStep 4.2 (from 1997) and FreeBSD 2.0 (from 1994), I gave up. Maybe it's time to give it another go for nostalgia's sake.

The 1985 release per Google Groups:

https://groups.google.com/g/net.sources.games/search?q=vtrek

For an example of how Google Groups screws up posts, here's a patch to vtrek:

https://usenet.trashworldnews.com/?thread=241631

And here's Google's version:

https://groups.google.com/g/net.sources.games/c/Rx_u0q5V5iE/...

The XENIX port (thanks again, Vince!):

https://svn.so-much-stuff.com/svn/trunk/cvs/trunk/games.d/vt...

Hints at how I might get vtrek to work:

https://comp.unix.programmer.narkive.com/KP4z3Ge2/problem-wi...

God bless Thomas Dickey, who's been maintaining vttest this whole time!

https://invisible-island.net/vttest/

Author of the article here, I encourage you to do so, and share the results!

I started this journey in 2006, doing the same as you, crawling old usenet archives in the newsgroups interface taht groups.google.com provided. Finding the code was troublesome, because I lost track of it, when moving from floppy disks, to different storage systems, until it has finally been preserved on github.

I find it fascinating that your father had a VT220, did he have it at home or in his office. I thought that kind of terminals were more like a thing of labs.

Regarding that VT220, I misremembered. My dad's workplace loaned him a 1200-baud modem and a C. Itoh terminal, maybe a CIT-101 because [this picture](https://terminals-wiki.org/wiki/index.php/File:C._Itoh_CIT-1...) matches my memory. He was a software engineer and occasionally worked from home.

We also has a Wyse 50 terminal. It's how we used the IMS 5000SX, which had both a 10-MB hard disk drive (I think it was called a Winchester) and a 5.25" floppy disk drive. I have a huge stash of 5.25-inch floppy diskettes from back then, including copies of TurboDOS (for the 5000SX) and Apple II games and little BASIC programs us kids wrote, but I've all but given up on recovering anything. The IMS 5000SX and the Wyse 50 terminal are long dead and buried. I've made some half-hearted attempts to boot TurboDOS up under simh, but it isn't the same. If they aren't all corrupt, I suspect my Apple diskettes have a virus of some kind on them, too.

Around 1991-1992, I helped a dentist install an electronic medical record system using a multi-user DOS variant called PC-MOS. We connected Link MC5 terminals via serial to a 386 running SoftDent, if I'm remembering it correctly. I got one of MC5s when that system was decommissioned. Unfortunately, I lost it in a house fire. Then, a few years later, I got another of the MC5s when the dentist was doing some housecleaning. I still have that one, and I'd use it more often if there wasn't something wonky with its serial interface's flow control that causes corrupted I/O.

Ah,that makes more sense. I see you inherited that engineering chops from your father, and that story with the dentist made me chuckle, it sounds like the first freelance attempts in the 20s :D

I started getting old computers back in the day, even a bulky IBM with AS/400, featuring a PowerPC RISC architecture, although it worked, and I learned how to login and all, I donated it to a friend that have a garage full of all kind of machines, that probably could preserve it better than me.

Regarding, the apple diskettes with virus, probably they are nowadays worth preserving too (for some archeological sleuthing) :D Thanks for sharing this story.!

I's trivial to add hjkl keys to trek, in any port. But bear in mind you would lose warp scalars.

OTOH, Trek for the ZMachine issues hotkeys for the both LRS and LRS.

System V trek it's at GH, but I find it's pretty much the same as BSD trek(6) from OpenBSD.

https://github.com/cculianu/trek

interesting

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