23 Feb
2016
23 Feb
'16
8:54 a.m.
On 23 February 2016 at 16:23, Ethan Dicks <ethan.dicks at gmail.com> wrote:
On Tue, Feb 23, 2016 at 12:38 AM, Richard Loken
<rlloken at telus.net> wrote:
On Mon, 22 Feb 2016, Mouse wrote:
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). 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. From the old BSD games there were a couple of
multiplayer games I
remember playing - sail ("wooden ships and iron men"),
and hunt
(possibly the original unix deathmatch)
I remember dialing in on an 1200/75 modem to play hunt against other
students on hardwired terminals and sun workstations. I could normally
stay at the top of the scoreboard until a volcano erupted (just too
many screen updates swamped the link :).
I even wrote a BBC terminal emulator and matching termcap entry to
optimise the speed and number of characters required for update, to
eke every character out of that bandwidth :-p
For a later fun terminal based game, sokoban consumed a few hours