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

[Ethan Dicks]

On Tue, Feb 23, 2016 at 11:29 AM, william degnan <billdegnan at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Tue, Feb 23, 2016 at 11:23 AM, Ethan Dicks <ethan.dicks at gmail.com> wrote:
>> ... 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.
>
> I never checked, I did not know there were VAX games that you could
> download/compile and run locally.  One of my VAXen has BASIC installed, but
> most are mostly file servers.  I'd like to learn more myself.

Back in the day when I used VAXen and terminals all day, every day, we
had a variety of exectutable games for VMS (and we never had BASIC on
that machine).  One of the most popular was EMPIRE (to disambiguate,
this EMPIRE was a single-player, random world with armies, planes and
ships where you captured a city, changed its production and took over
the world - binary only, source never released).  I also ported a
number of UNIX games acquired from comp.sources.games and
comp.games.unix to VMS with a VMS curses library and a C compiler
(Whitesmith's C, which we used for our own development, and later,
VAX-C) including rogue and Larn.  I had the Infotaskforce "pinfocom"
Z-machine when it was _the_ 3rd-party Z-machine.  In the FORTRAN
realm, there's ADVENT and DUNGEON (Bob Supnik's port of Zork) and I'm
sure plenty more.  These I have on old backup images (and probably on
the 8300 in the basement).  I'm looking for stuff I might not have
known of 25-30 years ago.

-ethan