Dumb Terminal games (was Re: Looking for a small fast VAX development machine)

Bob Brown bbrown at harpercollege.edu
Wed Feb 24 08:28:47 CST 2016


A big favorite around our campus was Conquest (multi player space battle) on a vax.
-Bob

-----Original Message-----
From: cctalk [mailto:cctalk-bounces at classiccmp.org] On Behalf Of Ethan Dicks
Sent: Tuesday, February 23, 2016 10:23 AM
To: General Discussion: On-Topic and Off-Topic Posts
Subject: Dumb Terminal games (was Re: Looking for a small fast VAX development machine)

On Tue, Feb 23, 2016 at 12:38 AM, Richard Loken <rlloken at telus.net> wrote:
> On Mon, 22 Feb 2016, Mouse wrote:
>
>>> Computer games require all you can give them [...]
>>
>> Only if your idea of "games" is "slick-looking realtime 3D-rendering 
>> games".  There are lots of games that work perfectly well on 
>> 3100-class (and even slower) machines, such as roguelikes (rogue, 
>> larn, hack, etc), text adventures (ADVENT, DUNGEON, etc), phantasia, 
>> Seahaven, Klondike...the list is long.
>
> But those are Computer Games!  Not computer games.  It is a long time 
> since I have played rogue.

I've been meaning to ask this question since I started cleaning up terminals this year... what are some favorites?  Some of the obvious classics are:

Adventure
Zork (and anything else on a Zmachine)
Scott Adams Adventures
Wumpus
Anything in Dave Ahl's "101 BASIC Computing Games"
Empire
Star Trek
rogue/hack
Larn/Ularn

But what are some other favorites?  I've been running a monthly "retrogaming night" at our Makerspace and so far have brought out a C-64, a PPC Mac, and an 8032 PET.  I'm looking to add a PDP-8 (via Oscar Vermuelen's PiDP-8, for portability) and (at first) a simh RT-11 box and/or VAX running VMS, though I have plenty of real DEC gear - it's a matter of transport and storage space).  I have a VT220 and an IBM 3101 (very VT52-like with a working terminfo entry) already on site and can add additional terminals if this becomes popular (I may drag in a VT52 just for the excuse to clean one up).

I have the Commodore end pretty well covered.  I'm looking for suggestions for 80x24 text games that can be played on an ANSI (VT100) terminal and especially non-ANSI (VT52 or that IBM 3101) on Unix/Linux, VMS, and RT-11.  So in general, anything that uses curses or direct ANSI sequences or just spews text to a glass tty.

-ethan


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