A custom virtual machine for the Stars 4X game(nullprogram.com)
109 pointsby ibobev5 days ago22 comments
  • em3rgent0rdr3 days ago
    > the authors couldn’t afford to build a sloppy, wasteful UI, and so by modern standards the game UI is remarkably fast and responsive. They don’t make ‘em like they used to.

    I also miss this aspect of old windows games. "Castle of the Wind" the RPG is another example of a game that unashamedly uses Windows' built-in UI elements just fine. I wish more games just stuck to them. Then things like pressing tab to cycle focus to different UI elements still works and developers wouldn't have to worry about introducing bugs in their custom UIs.

  • philipov3 days ago
    Wow, Stars! I loved this game so much as a child. Back then, after upgrading from shareware I had to wait for a floppy disk to arrive in the mail.
    • mike_hearn2 days ago
      Ha, same! As teenagers me and my friends got into it and we'd play by sneakernet. Every day at school we'd exchange floppies with that day's turn. It sounds insanely slow but turns in Stars! could easily take an hour to prepare one the game got going because of all the micromanagement required to handle a large empire. So it fitted OK around homework and dinner.

      I played a lot of it back in the day... makes me nostalgic to play again. But this emulator requires Intel and I have ARM Macs.

      Probably these days it wouldn't be hard to vibe up a modern equivalent especially with the MCP the author talks about.

      • altairprime2 days ago
        Works perfectly fine in Crossover. Enable Hires in a bottle, Configure Wine to 217ppi under Display tab, copy Stars-x86.exe to C:/Prog(x86)/Stars/, simulate reboot, wait a minute for Crossover to rescan, double-click Stars-x86 icon. It launches behind other open windows so click the dock icon or cmd-tab to it once it’s running.
    • Majromax3 days ago
      Wasn't the shareware version fully featured, such that only the key was necessary?
      • MaulingMonkey2 days ago
        The final shareware version (2.6) was fairly comparable to the retail version (2.7). This says the shareware version just lacked some sound effects...? https://web.archive.org/web/20091129230733/http://wiki.gible...

        However, I believe the first shareware version I had was 1.x (distributed via CD that was packed full of shareware) which was significantly different. I remember mining fuel, which tracks with the above link.

        Stars! was one of my very first video game purchases. I remember mailing a money order, and recieving a copy in the mail - I didn't have internet at the time. I'm not sure I even knew the internet existed then, although I would soon after if not.

      • giantrobot2 days ago
        AFAIK this was the case. I played a lot of Stars! (almost exclusively the shareware) and it had all the races and tech trees. It showed higher level tech trees but those were only available in the registered game. Map sizes were also limited in the shareware. Later versions might have required additional resources for the retail upgrade but I believe the version I had (2.5?) could become the full registered copy with just a key.
      • philipov2 days ago
        The shareware version I had was missing stuff until I upgraded. It was before 2.0 came out, but I don't remember the details after all this time. I believe it didn't have all the techs? Something important wasn't available.
  • jauntywundrkind3 days ago
    I forget whether it was steam or GE-Proton I ran it under but ran just fine on Linux. Have to say, I did crash out after 40 turns though, which is ridiculous, after thinking so much about Stars! for so long.

    News here: there's an MCP server!! Oh snap!! This is great. I really love the idea of games that have external interfaces. There's a ton of tiny macro to stars, and being able to say, get every warship in the sector over to that planet at the same time with efficient fuel usage would be a lovely awesome thing to watch happen.

    I look forward to more and more games having MCP (or other external interfaces). I'm sure there's others out there already, but definitely happy to see Stars! pointing the way forward yet again, decades latter.

    • tetha3 days ago
      It's funny. My experience of running Win95-Era Games, especially more wonky one like Cavelands on Linux with Wine is far better than on Windows. And DosBox is a given. So e.g. both Civ 2 and Civ 1 are just standard launchers on my Linux box.

      And with something like Lutris, it's not a lot of tinkering. "Install game from setup.exe". Done in a lot of cases, needs a few winetricks or dll overrides in some cases for the wonky ones.

  • programd3 days ago
    The star map screenshot looks very similar to star map in "Remnants of the Precursors" [1], which is a modernization of 1993 "Master of Orion" [2]. Convergent evolution, or was 1995 Stars! an homage/clone of Orion?

    1. https://rayfowler.itch.io/remnants-of-the-precursors

    2. https://store.steampowered.com/app/410970/Master_of_Orion_1/

    • Hussell2 days ago
      Remnants of the Precursors resembles Stars!, but Stars! doesn't seem to much resemble Master of Orion 1 or 2. Seems to be convergent evolution. If I recall correctly, there were many similar 4X in space games at the time, and Master of Orion 1 didn't stand out much - it was Master of Orion II that was a big hit, relatively speaking (4X in space were/are a bit niche).
    • Majromax2 days ago
      I can't speak for the authors' mindsets, but the Stars! map had pointwise movement rather than via strict stellar/planetary waypoints. When fleet interceptions can happen midcourse[1], there's not a whole lot of design room within the Win16 style.

      [1] — If I remember correctly, there even was some special-case code for ship pursuit cycles.

    • tomsonj2 days ago
      see also Spaceward Ho!
  • Espressosaurus3 days ago
    A pity Supernova was never finished. Stars! Without all the Econ micromanagement would have gotten rid of one of the bigger mechanical advantages someone with a lot of patience had.
  • philsnow3 days ago
    I kind of wish i had tried this when i was younger, but VGA Planets got hold of me first and teenage me apparently had stupid video game tribalism
  • BSTRhino3 days ago
    I loved this game back in the day and was looking for a way to play it just last month! I will definitely be trying this.
  • unsnap_biceps3 days ago
    I loved stars! and really wish that it gets reimagined for the modern age. Stellaris gets way too micro-managing to be fun IMHO.
    • bigyabai3 days ago
      You should try Aurora 4X, if you haven't. Not quite a full reimagining, but still oodles of fun.
    • mike_hearn2 days ago
      But Stars! was very heavy on the micromanagement. I remember wishing it had a scripting language.
  • Telaneo3 days ago
    Very neat! I hope we'll see more of this kind of work. Most games are well-behaved enough to simply run in Dosbox, an emulator, or through Wine, but there are a few tough nuts there that either need a very specific config, or just actual hardware. Having a known good config wrapped up in a VM seems like a great solution.
  • mike_hearn2 days ago
    Really cool effort but it might be better to just document the game mechanics really well, reimplement an open source version and then use it as a base to improve it, OpenTTD style. Stars! was fun for the day but had a lot of frustrating problems as well, in particular how much effort it required to complete a turn in the later stages due to the lack of automation features. And of course some nicer graphics wouldn't go amiss.

    The hard part is knowing why exactly it was compelling despite apparently violating all the rules of good game design...

  • DrHungers3 days ago
    Stars is a great game. Its a bit dated now, but still has a lot of charm, is fun and interesting and nobody's quite made a game like it (actually they probably have I just don't know about it).
    • rmunn2 days ago
      It had so many strategic choices, giving it a depth that would surprise most modern gamers seeing it for the first time. Starting with the race design, where your choices can make or break your game. Choose wisely! Then there's ship design, which is a whole other layer of possibilities.

      Plus, the fact that you can fly anywhere through space, not just through artificially-constrained wormholes, means that the strategy of attacking another player can involve a lot of subtlety and bluffing. Fly a medium-sized fleet into deep space, skirting the edge of his scanner range, while you fly a big fleet directly towards his key production worlds. Then on the turn when he is expecting you to reach his worlds and start bombing (and when you think he's going to send his ships to intercept yours), turn your big fleet around and fly it home. Meanwhile, fly your smaller, pre-positioned fleet in from the other side of his empire. His ships will be caught out of position as they'll follow their orders to chase your fleet, a lot farther than he thought they would in one turn, and they won't get back to the other side of his empire in time to prevent you doing a lot of damage. Then, when he's not paying attention to your big fleet, turn it around AGAIN and do even more damage.

      There are ways to counter that, of course, but it's easy to catch people off-guard if they haven't noticed yet that you can send ships anywhere, not just between two planets.

      What an excellent game that was. I'm so glad it's possible to play it again.

  • halyconWays2 days ago
    I never thought I'd see someone else in the wild who remembers Stars! Next we'll be talking about Anacreon and Talisman.
  • breakingcups3 days ago
    > I’m distributing 32-bit builds (but requires SSE2) because there’s no advantage to 64-bit here, and these builds work (almost) everywhere

    Kinda ironic given the article's subject of 16-bit mode no longer being available...

  • dimgl2 days ago
    Oh my God, I thought I was the only one who remembered this game!
  • robertlagrant2 days ago
    I used to absolutely love this game. I'm going to give it a try soon. Can't wait.
  • krige3 days ago
    Absolutely amazing. Can't wait to send out potato bugs and assemble scouts.
  • rkagerer2 days ago
    Out of curiosity, any easy way to run this on Android?
  • nullsmack2 days ago
    oh wow, idk where I got it from but I had a zip file of this game back in the later 90s. It might've come from one of the shareware cds I bought back then.
  • Fervicus3 days ago
    Blast from the past. Used to love playing this game as a kid.
  • deterministica day ago
    What an excellent read and project! This is why I read HN :)
  • astockwell2 days ago
    Now if someone could publish a patch that overcomes the 10,000 fleet identifier limit!
  • waterpowder2 days ago
    I really loved this game as a kid, excited to give it another go!