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.

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

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?

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."

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

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.

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?

Anyone here play xevil ?

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

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

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

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!

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.)

Reads like ChatGPT wrote it.

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

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

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.

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/

interesting