[COFF] Re: [TUHS] Re: Unix game origins - stories similar to Crowther's Adventure

[Clem Cole <clemc@ccc.com>]

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Switching to COFF

On Wed, Feb 1, 2023 at 1:33 PM segaloco via TUHS <tuhs@tuhs.org> wrote:

> In the annals of UNIX gaming, have there ever been notable games that have
> operated as multiple processes, perhaps using formal IPC or even just pipes
> or shared files for communication between separate processes (games with
> networking notwithstanding)?
>
Yes - there were a number of them. Both for UNIX and other wise.  Some
spanned the Arpanet back in the day on the PDP-10's. There was  an early
first person shooter games that I remember that ran on the PDP-10s on
ADM3As and VT52 that worked that way.   You flew into space and fought each
other.

CMU's (Steve Rubin's) Trip was stand alone program - sort of the
grand-daddy of the Star Trek games. It ran on a GDP2 (Triple-Drip Graphics
Wonder) and had dedicated 11/20. It was multiple processes to do
everything. You were at the Captions chair of the Enterprise looking out
into space. You had various mission and at some point would bee to
reprovision - which meant you had to dock at the 2001 space
station including timing your rotation to line up with docking bay like in
the movie.      When you beat an alien ship you got a bottle of coke - all
of which collected in row on the bottom of the screen.

I did manage to save the (BLISS-11) sources to it a few years ago.    One
of my dreams is to try to write GDP simulator for SIMH and see if we can
bring it back to life. A big issue as Rob knows is the GDPs had an amazing
keyboard so duplicating it will take some thinking with modern HW; but HW
has caught up such that I think it might be possible to emulate it.   SIMH
works really well with a number of the other Graphics systems and with my
modem system like my current Mac and its graphics HW, there might be a
chance.

One of my other favorites was one that ran on the Xerox Alto's who's name I
don't remember, where you wandered around the Xerox 3M ethernet.  People
would enter your system and appear on your system.  IIRC Byte Magazine did
an article that talked about it at one point -- this was all pre-Apple Macs
- but I remember they had pictures of people playing it that I think they
took at Stanford.   IIRC Shortly after the X-Terminals appeared somebody
tried to duplicate it, or maybe that was with the Bilts but it was not
quite as good as those of us that had access to real Xerox Altos.
ᐧ

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