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

[David Brownlee]

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:
>>
>>>> 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).

>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