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
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!
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)
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.
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?
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?
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.!
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.