[net.sources.games] VMS Empire: Clarification

edjames@ic.Berkeley.EDU (Ed James) (12/20/86)

Sorry for the confusion about VMS Empire.  The game was originally
written for VMS, but the version I posted has been hacked to work
under 4BSD UNIX for Vaxes.  It is a human-vs-computer game released
through DECUS.

I call it VMS Empire to distinguish it from PSL Empire.  The version 
I posted is not for VMS.  I will post the VMS version as soon as I
figure out how to get our VMS machine to spit it's files onto 
a UNIX box.

I hate DecNet.
							--ed

ps:  Sorry to post a non-source thing to net.sources.  This doesn't
	mean I am net brain-dead.  I just wanted to reach all you 
	folks who read net.source.games and not rec.games.empire.
	Please don't fill up my mailbox with net.usage docs! :-)
	Post rebuttals to rec.games.empire, not net.sources.

falk%peregrine@Sun.COM (Ed Falk) (12/21/86)

>Sorry for the confusion about VMS Empire.  The game was originally
>written for VMS, but the version I posted has been hacked to work
>under 4BSD UNIX for Vaxes.  It is a human-vs-computer game released
>through DECUS.
>
Great game.  I used to play it all the time on Data General machines.

I couldn't get it to work on Suns though.  It was very poorly written and had
many hardware dependencies.  In particular, it would often put a value between
0-255 in an integer*4 and pass it to a subroutine that expected character*1.
This means it only works on machines that address bytes within a word from low
to high and which pass character variables by single address (i.e. only Dec).

There were also problems with curses and I finally gave up.

I realize this isn't Ed James' fault, but does anyone have a version that works
on a better variety of hardware?


		-ed falk, sun microsystems
terrorist, cryptography, DES, drugs, cipher, secret, decode, NSA, CIA, NRO.
(The above is food for the NSA line eater.)