tsf@druxn.UUCP (FisherTS) (10/03/85)
Version 1.1 Old Empire (Empire Classic ?) source (!!) is ready for distribution. In my article in late June, I promised that if there were enough bugs reported (and I had the time to fix them !) there would be another release ready about now. So.... For the uninitiated, here are a few excerpts from the original article. > Old Empire is a version of Peter Langston's empire game as it looked > around 1980. The source for this version was obtained by > decompiling the optimized PDP-11/70 object code. > > The empire source is about 11K lines of C. The output from the > decompiler is ugly and shouldn't be discussed in front of young kids. > There are zillion goto statements where you would normally find > 'for' and 'while' loops (I straightened a few things out when doing > the final editing of the decompiler output, but there are still a lot > of goto's). There might be a few "original" bugs left, but I know > there are an equal number introduced by the decompilation and triple > porting operations. > > This version has the rectangular grid, unimplemented agribusiness, no > nukes, and only the original 7 ship types (batt, carr, dest, sub, tend, > pt, and freight). No new bells or whistles have been added. In fact, > every effort was made to restore the game to its original condition, > but with bugs exterminated. > > The distribution comes with Buglist and README files. I can post the > Buglist to the net if people want to see it. It runs on a 5.0 VAX, > 5.2 Amdahl UTS, and 5.2.2 3b [and now 4.2BSD]. The makefiles aren't > the greatest, but I find them useful. > > Please direct all Old Empire flames and bug reports to me. I'll > respond to bug reports as I find time. > > If you want this fine antique, send a S.A.S.T to > Tom Fisher > AT&T-ISL Room 31G32 > 11900 N. Pecos St. > Denver, CO 80234 Version 1.1 has the following improvements over Version 1.0: 1) It uses buffered I/O - faster 2) torp command gets mobility right, doesn't allow torp'ing from subs you don't own, doesn't allow torp'ing sunken ships. 3) only tenders can tend 4) only capitals you own can build BTUs (in Version 1.0 an unowned fort at 0,0 will do the trick!) 5) The shell command accepts more than one command 6) The shell command works! 7) redirection and piping work 8) dependencies on fcntl.h, time.h, termio.h are fixed so that it is more compatible with 4.2BSD. 9) A new sread function for 4.2BSD 10) calls to rand() are fixed so that they will work regardless of 16 or 32-bit results. (Random() is better on 4.2, but it isn't available on SysV). 11) checkpoints are cleared on collection 12) makefiles for SysV are better. Unless I can fix them up before shipping, they're worse for 4.2 BSD. 13) ... and 11 other miscellaneous bug fixes. Many thanks to davee at hp and mjs at eagle for the reports and psl for the consultation. You can get the whole release by sending a tape (600' will do) to the above address. Tom Fisher ihnp4!druxn!tsf (303)-538-4642