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

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

[Clem Cole]

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

[Dan Cross]

[TUHS to Bcc]

On Wed, Feb 1, 2023 at 2:11 PM Rich Salz <rich.salz@gmail.com> wrote:
> 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)?
>
> https://www.unix.com/man-page/bsd/6/hunt/
> source at http://ftp.funet.fi/pub/unix/4.3bsd/reno/games/hunt/hunt/

Hunt was the one that I thought of immediately. We used to play that
on Suns and VAXen and it could be lively.

There were a number of such games, as Clem mentioned; others I
remember were xtrek, hearts, and various Chess and Go servers.

        - Dan C.

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

[Dan Cross]

[TUHS to Bcc]

On Wed, Feb 1, 2023 at 3:23 PM Douglas McIlroy
<douglas.mcilroy@dartmouth.edu> 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
>
> I don't know any Unix examples, but DTSS (Dartmouth Time Sharing
> System) "communication files" were used for the purpose. For a fuller
> story see https://www.cs.dartmouth.edu/~doug/DTSS/commfiles.pdf

Interesting. This is now being discussed on the Multicians list (which
had a DTSS emulator! Done for use by SIPB). Warren Montgomery
discussed communication files under DTSS for precisely this kind of
thing; apparently he had a chess program he may have run under them.
Barry Margolin responded that he wrote a multiuser chat program using
them on the DTSS system at Grumman.

Margolin suggests a modern Unix-ish analogue may be pseudo-ttys, which
came up here earlier (I responded pointing to your wonderful note
linked above).

> > This is probably a bit more Plan 9-ish than UNIX-ish
>
> So it was with communication files, which allowed IO system calls to
> be handled in userland. Unfortunately, communication files were
> complicated and turned out to be an evolutionary dead end. They had
> had no ancestral connection to successors like pipes and Plan 9.
> Equally unfortunately, 9P, the very foundation of Plan 9, seems to
> have met the same fate.

I wonder if there was an analogy to multiplexed files, which I admit
to knowing very little about. A cursory glance at mpx(2) on 7th
Edition at least suggests some surface similarities.

        - Dan C.

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

[scj]

I was responsible for two games on Unix: Ching and GoFish.
Ching was a fortune-telling game: you would type a question or situation 
as a text.  The program would hash the text, convert it into yarrow 
sticks, and use display the "fortune".  I copied the fortunes from a 
book, so I don't think ching actually was ever part of a Unix 
distribution because of the copyright.  Some hand-carried versions got 
out, though, I think.

The other game I wrote for my son: it played the game "Go Fish".  It was 
amazingly hard to win, even for an adult, because it used a simple 
card-counting strategy: if the opponent asked for a 6 and I didn't have 
one I'd remember that the opponent had a 6, and when I drew one I 
immediately asked for it.  A number of my co-workers tried the game out, 
and most of them lost badly.  GoFish was distributed, and I actually was 
accused in public by someone who was sure the game cheated!

A couple of years ago, a co-worker was showing me a "Unix on a chip" 
machine, and I saw that it had the sources for everything.  I looked at 
the source for it, which was in C -- one of the first C programs I 
wrote.  As I read the code, I discovered a bug: a type mismatch when 
calling a function.  It was a bug, but didn't affect the behavior.  The 
other thing I noticed was that the program had three GOTO's in it.  I 
blushed...

Steve
---


On 2023-02-01 15:24, Dan Cross wrote:
> [TUHS to Bcc]
> 
> On Wed, Feb 1, 2023 at 3:23 PM Douglas McIlroy
> <douglas.mcilroy@dartmouth.edu> 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
>> 
>> I don't know any Unix examples, but DTSS (Dartmouth Time Sharing
>> System) "communication files" were used for the purpose. For a fuller
>> story see https://www.cs.dartmouth.edu/~doug/DTSS/commfiles.pdf
> 
> Interesting. This is now being discussed on the Multicians list (which
> had a DTSS emulator! Done for use by SIPB). Warren Montgomery
> discussed communication files under DTSS for precisely this kind of
> thing; apparently he had a chess program he may have run under them.
> Barry Margolin responded that he wrote a multiuser chat program using
> them on the DTSS system at Grumman.
> 
> Margolin suggests a modern Unix-ish analogue may be pseudo-ttys, which
> came up here earlier (I responded pointing to your wonderful note
> linked above).
> 
>> > This is probably a bit more Plan 9-ish than UNIX-ish
>> 
>> So it was with communication files, which allowed IO system calls to
>> be handled in userland. Unfortunately, communication files were
>> complicated and turned out to be an evolutionary dead end. They had
>> had no ancestral connection to successors like pipes and Plan 9.
>> Equally unfortunately, 9P, the very foundation of Plan 9, seems to
>> have met the same fate.
> 
> I wonder if there was an analogy to multiplexed files, which I admit
> to knowing very little about. A cursory glance at mpx(2) on 7th
> Edition at least suggests some surface similarities.
> 
>         - Dan C.