looking for a program - last gasp questions
Not star-trek I am trying to track down the source of a unix game . Years and years ago - 1980s - I was in the Computing Science Department at Strathclyde Uni. and we had a bunch of BSD4 systems running on VAXen. I have memory of - but have never located - a curses based 24 x 80 display - multi-user "space-war" game that allowed you to navigate around a 3D universe with the 24 x 80 giving you a full screen view of the universe.. In the game you could * hunt the universe for aliens (like "shankers" I cant remember the others), * other players - you saw them as they saw you you could also team up with other players to have more firepower and call for help using a 1-line on screen chat/broadcast system, there were planet(s) scattered about - that you could hide behind. The students and I modified the program with some "special features". I cant remember if the name of program was changed too ;-( Anyway we knew the game as "search", it was written in C - it was a good test of serial output capability of the VAXen - it was also a great way to teach students about the VI keys - since hjkl worked as expected for movement (at least that was out excuse to the prof when caught playing the game during the day). From my poor description can anybody tie down what I am looking for? Appreciated Iain
Re: looking for a program - last gasp questions
are you thinking of conquest? https://github.com/jtrulson/conquest conquest Conquest is a top-down, real time space warfare game. It was originally written in RATFOR for the VAX/VMS system in 1983 by Jef Poskanzer and Craig Leres. I spent incredible amounts of time playing this game with my friends in the terminal labs at college, and when I actually had a multi-user system running at home (Unixware) I decided to try and translate/port the code to C in Unix. This was in the early to mid 1990's. Of course, over the years many things have changed. Today, Conquest is a true client/server game. The client uses freeglut, SDL 2.0 (for sound) and OpenGL. It uses C++11 to build, though for now it's "C software with some C++ containers and constructs". The curses client is no longer provided. On Thu, Oct 17, 2019 at 12:00 PM Dr Iain Maoileoin via cctalk wrote: > > Not star-trek > > I am trying to track down the source of a unix game . > > Years and years ago - 1980s - I was in the Computing Science Department > at Strathclyde Uni. and we had a bunch of BSD4 systems running on VAXen. > > I have memory of - but have never located - a curses based 24 x 80 > display - multi-user "space-war" game that allowed you to navigate > around a 3D universe with the 24 x 80 giving you a full screen view of > the universe.. > > In the game you could > > * hunt the universe for aliens (like "shankers" I cant remember the > others), > * other players - you saw them as they saw you > > you could also team up with other players to have more firepower and > call for help using a 1-line on screen chat/broadcast system, > there were planet(s) scattered about - that you could hide behind. > > The students and I modified the program with some "special features". I > cant remember if the name of program was changed too ;-( > > Anyway we knew the game as "search", it was written in C - it was a good > test of serial output capability of the VAXen - it was also a great way > to teach students about the VI keys - since hjkl worked as expected for > movement (at least that was out excuse to the prof when caught playing > the game during the day). > > From my poor description can anybody tie down what I am looking for? > > Appreciated > > Iain >
Re: looking for a program - last gasp questions
> On Oct 17, 2019, at 12:55 PM, Bob Smith via cctalk > wrote: > > are you thinking of conquest? > https://github.com/jtrulson/conquest > > conquest > > Conquest is a top-down, real time space warfare game. It was > originally written in RATFOR for the VAX/VMS system in 1983 by Jef > Poskanzer and Craig Leres. I wonder if this is a port of the PLATO game by the same name, which goes back to 1976 or so. PLATO had lots of multi-user games with various levels of graphics sophistication. Space war games included "conquest", "empire", and "spasim" -- that last actually had 3d graphics, which was quite a stretch for 1977. Then there was "airfight" (the inspiration for Microsoft Flight Simulator) as well as a boatload of "dungeon & dragons" games. paul
Re: looking for a program - last gasp questions
Was it in use at Berkeley? I might have it stashed away in some of my BSD-related tapes. --Chuck
Re: cctalk Digest, Vol 61, Issue 16 Message 11 - computer game
> > Date: Thu, 17 Oct 2019 12:55:09 -0400 > From: Bob Smith > To: Dr Iain Maoileoin via cctalk > Subject: Re: looking for a program - last gasp questions > Message-ID: > > Content-Type: text/plain; charset="UTF-8" > > are you thinking of conquest? > https://github.com/jtrulson/conquest > > conquest > > Conquest is a top-down, real time space warfare game. It was > originally written in RATFOR for the VAX/VMS system in 1983 by Jef > Poskanzer and Craig Leres. > > I spent incredible amounts of time playing this game with my friends > in the terminal labs at college, and when I actually had a multi-user > system running at home (Unixware) I decided to try and translate/port > the code to C in Unix. This was in the early to mid 1990's. > > Of course, over the years many things have changed. Today, Conquest is > a true client/server game. The client uses freeglut, SDL 2.0 (for > sound) and OpenGL. It uses C++11 to build, though for now it's "C > software with some C++ containers and constructs”. Fraid not ;-( no grid in search…. You actually scrolled through the universe on your 24 x 80! If you passed a plannet/star then you could see it on screen ( in the distance, or with a screen full of *’s as you hit it!) It had a vast universe and you could scroll around the universe for a hour without seeing the same place. > 4 or 5 of us playing it really cranked up the CPU load. I think many terminals were 9600, if you got your hands on a 19200 or better you were a p*g *n sh*t. On and off I have been hunting for this for 3-4 years. I know I am not making it up - it did come from some US university.
Yahoo Groups going away
A bit off topic, but I figure a number of us are interested in this older "social media" mechanism. https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2019/10/yahoo-is-deleting-all-content-ever-posted-to-yahoo-groups/ So if you subscribe to any Yahoo groups, or value any of that content, be sure to archive it before your friendly telco sends ALL of it to the bit bucket. paul
Re: Yahoo Groups going away
Thanks for the link! Groups are already jumping ship. The popular destination seems to be groups.io, which has some good features. Zane Sent from my iPod > On Oct 17, 2019, at 1:51 PM, Paul Koning via cctalk > wrote: > > A bit off topic, but I figure a number of us are interested in this older > "social media" mechanism. > > https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2019/10/yahoo-is-deleting-all-content-ever-posted-to-yahoo-groups/ > > So if you subscribe to any Yahoo groups, or value any of that content, be > sure to archive it before your friendly telco sends ALL of it to the bit > bucket. > >paul >
Re: Yahoo Groups going away
> So if you subscribe to any Yahoo groups, or value any of that content, be > sure to archive it before your friendly telco sends ALL of it to the bit > bucket. Yeah, it sucks. The Tomy Tutor users group has been there for years, and I guess we'll jump over to groups.io. I managed to archive everything last night. -- personal: http://www.cameronkaiser.com/ -- Cameron Kaiser * Floodgap Systems * www.floodgap.com * ckai...@floodgap.com -- No good deed goes unpunished. -- Clare Boothe Luce -
Re: Yahoo Groups going away
Cameron said > Yeah, it sucks. The Tomy Tutor users group has been there for years, and I > guess we'll jump over to groups.io. I managed to archive everything last > night. What's your strategy for archiving material off YahooGroups? Their Files and Photo (photostreams) sections are so heavily Javascript-encrusted that it's not at all easy to bulk archive from them. I tried a few tools (httrack, wget, curl) with no valid results, but I only used some basic settings.
Re: Yahoo Groups going away
> On Oct 17, 2019, at 3:32 PM, Cameron Kaiser via cctalk > wrote: > >> So if you subscribe to any Yahoo groups, or value any of that content, be >> sure to archive it before your friendly telco sends ALL of it to the bit >> bucket. > > Yeah, it sucks. The Tomy Tutor users group has been there for years, and I > guess we'll jump over to groups.io. I managed to archive everything last > night. The 3D photography group I’m on just moved to groups.io this afternoon. When I went and looked just now, it looks like all the files moved as well. Other groups I’m on had already moved. Zane
Re: Yahoo Groups going away
On Fri, 18 Oct 2019, Steve Malikoff via cctalk wrote: What's your strategy for archiving material off YahooGroups? Their Files and Photo (photostreams) sections are so heavily Javascript-encrusted that it's not at all easy to bulk archive from them. I tried a few tools (httrack, wget, curl) with no valid results, but I only used some basic settings. https://www.archiveteam.org/index.php?title=Yahoo!_Groups has some of the needed information. And, there are some Python scripts for slurping up the messages.
Re: Yahoo Groups going away
Yes, other groups i belong to that moved have previously said that groups.io has a method of pulling groups over. Pull rather than push seems to be the way to go. Best to attack it from the groups.io end after setting up the new group there. On 17/10/2019 21:12, Zane Healy via cctalk wrote: On Oct 17, 2019, at 3:32 PM, Cameron Kaiser via cctalk wrote: So if you subscribe to any Yahoo groups, or value any of that content, be sure to archive it before your friendly telco sends ALL of it to the bit bucket. Yeah, it sucks. The Tomy Tutor users group has been there for years, and I guess we'll jump over to groups.io. I managed to archive everything last night. The 3D photography group I’m on just moved to groups.io this afternoon. When I went and looked just now, it looks like all the files moved as well. Other groups I’m on had already moved. Zane -- Nigel Johnson MSc., MIEEE VE3ID/G4AJQ/VA3MCU Amateur Radio, the origin of the open-source concept! You can reach me by voice on Skype: TILBURY2591 If time travel ever will be possible, it already is. Ask me again yesterday This e-mail is not and cannot, by its nature, be confidential. En route from me to you, it will pass across the public Internet, easily readable by any number of system administrators along the way. Nigel Johnson Please consider the environment when deciding if you really need to print this message
Re: Yahoo Groups going away
On Thu, 17 Oct 2019, Nigel Johnson via cctalk wrote: Yes, other groups i belong to that moved have previously said that groups.io has a method of pulling groups over. Pull rather than push seems to be the way to go. Best to attack it from the groups.io end after setting up the new group there. The guy who runs groups.io is the one who created onelist, which became e-groups, with got swallowed up by Yahoo!, and then he left. He knows how to do it. People who have switched over seem happy with it. BUT, does he have an appropriate level of resources to handle THAT much traffic?
Re: Yahoo Groups going away
On 10/17/2019 6:08 PM, Steve Malikoff via cctalk wrote: Cameron said Yeah, it sucks. The Tomy Tutor users group has been there for years, and I guess we'll jump over to groups.io. I managed to archive everything last night. What's your strategy for archiving material off YahooGroups? Their Files and Photo (photostreams) sections are so heavily Javascript-encrusted that it's not at all easy to bulk archive from them. I tried a few tools (httrack, wget, curl) with no valid results, but I only used some basic settings. There is a now obsolete plugin for firefox called "downloadthemall" that sucks the files down. I saw elsewhere in the thread there may be scripts to scrape messages, will look at that. Downloadthemall sees the string of crap after the file name, and apparently it comes down with the correct file contents and file name. I just downloaded it one directory at a time, because DTA doesn't do a recursion in any way. I have an old set of perl code which I used in 2016 to grab several groups in their entirety, and now need to get from there forward. The thing that happened pre-Verizon was they rolled out a mangling of the groups code called "neo" which still remains in the URL. They killed the original code most tools could scrape groups from by turning off all but the neo type site. Grabyahoogroups.pl is the code FWIW that did work. I'm glad someone found something if it works with the messages. thanks Jim
Re: Yahoo Groups going away
> > Yeah, it sucks. The Tomy Tutor users group has been there for years, and I > > guess we'll jump over to groups.io. I managed to archive everything last > > night. > > What's your strategy for archiving material off YahooGroups? Their Files and > Photo (photostreams) sections are so heavily Javascript-encrusted that it's > not at all easy to bulk archive from them. I tried a few tools (httrack, wget, > curl) with no valid results, but I only used some basic settings. For the messages, I used https://github.com/andrewferguson/YahooGroups-Archiver Unfortunately, the (rather inadequate) Y!G API for files makes it difficult to iterate over files in a directory tree. I ended up manually downloading them, since it was only about 30 files and not worth ginning up something to scrape them. Some people have used https://github.com/csaftoiu/yahoo-groups-backup to get everything but it needs a MongoDB instance which seemed kind of overkill for a one-time dump. -- personal: http://www.cameronkaiser.com/ -- Cameron Kaiser * Floodgap Systems * www.floodgap.com * ckai...@floodgap.com -- Political correctness is tyranny with manners. -- Charlton Heston --
RE: Yahoo Groups going away
> > The guy who runs groups.io is the one who created onelist, which became > e-groups, with got swallowed up by Yahoo!, and then he left. > > He knows how to do it. People who have switched over seem happy with > it. > BUT, does he have an appropriate level of resources to handle THAT much > traffic? I saw a posting about this on one of the groups I am in (XXCopy) and it seems as if groups.io is not free. At least there was talk of a $110 payment. -Ali
Re: Yahoo Groups going away
On 10/17/2019 9:49 PM, Ali via cctalk wrote: The guy who runs groups.io is the one who created onelist, which became e-groups, with got swallowed up by Yahoo!, and then he left. He knows how to do it. People who have switched over seem happy with it. BUT, does he have an appropriate level of resources to handle THAT much traffic? I saw a posting about this on one of the groups I am in (XXCopy) and it seems as if groups.io is not free. At least there was talk of a $110 payment. -Ali The groups are free as long as you use less than 1GB of storage. More storage costs. Unfortunately, since this past February, you also have to pay in order to have Groups.IO do the moving of your messages, files and photos. No freebie for that anymore. -- John H. Reinhardt
RE: Yahoo Groups going away
> The groups are free as long as you use less than 1GB of storage. More > storage costs. Unfortunately, since this past February, you also have > to pay in order to have Groups.IO do the moving of your messages, files > and photos. No freebie for that anymore. That explains it. BTW: is February when Yahoo first announced the shutdown of Yahoo Groups? Just wondering -Ali
RE: Yahoo Groups going away
On Thu, 17 Oct 2019, Ali wrote: I saw a posting about this on one of the groups I am in (XXCopy) and it seems as if groups.io is not free. At least there was talk of a $110 payment. Groups.io has a free level. But, if you subscribe to "premium" for one year ($110), then they will do the transfer for you.
Looking for DEC RA80 (or RM80, R80) service manual (EK-ORA80-SV or similar)
Hi all -- I have an R80 drive in my VAX-11/730 cabinet that I'm trying to get running. Symptoms are: most of the time when the Run/Load switch is depressed, the drive will begin spinning up for 1-2 seconds (sometimes as long as 3-4 seconds) and then stop, faulting with error code 01 ("Spindle Timeout Error"). Every now and again it will spin up and go ready -- the other night it ran for several hours, long enough for me to get a dump of the disk with no read errors (*). I've checked the usual -- the motor and the spindle spin freely and the belt is good and tight. Connectors have been cleaned and reseated, as have socketed ICs. Power supply voltages are OK. The motor start cap tests fine. I'm getting pulses from the optical spindle sensor. I suspected that the brake might have been slowing things down during spin-up as it was a bit noisy (due to some light corrosion), but the spin-up error persists even with it entirely removed. I haven't been able to find the actual service manual for the R80 (or the very closely related RA80 and RM80 drives). Anyone have a copy stashed somewhere? Anyone have any debugging advice? Thanks as always, Josh (*) The drive contained a 4.3BSD system used to run a bbs and uucp relay, "Darkstar 730" out of Beaverton, OR. Looks like it was last run in the early 1990s. Now I just need to track down the owner :).
Re: Looking for DEC RA80 (or RM80, R80) service manual (EK-ORA80-SV or similar)
On Thu, Oct 17, 2019 at 8:45 PM Josh Dersch via cctalk wrote: > > I haven't been able to find the actual service manual for the R80 (or the > very closely related RA80 and RM80 drives). Anyone have a copy stashed > somewhere? Have you already seen this one? RA80 Disk Drive Service Manual, EP-ORA80-SV-002 https://www.ebay.com/itm/DEC-RA80-Disk-Drive-Service-Manual-Microfiche/312205107345 Microfiche would be a pain to deal with, but cheap and maybe at least slightly better than nothing.
Re: Looking for DEC RA80 (or RM80, R80) service manual (EK-ORA80-SV or similar)
On Thu, Oct 17, 2019 at 8:59 PM Glen Slick via cctalk wrote: > On Thu, Oct 17, 2019 at 8:45 PM Josh Dersch via cctalk > wrote: > > > > I haven't been able to find the actual service manual for the R80 (or the > > very closely related RA80 and RM80 drives). Anyone have a copy stashed > > somewhere? > > Have you already seen this one? > > RA80 Disk Drive Service Manual, EP-ORA80-SV-002 > > https://www.ebay.com/itm/DEC-RA80-Disk-Drive-Service-Manual-Microfiche/312205107345 > > Microfiche would be a pain to deal with, but cheap and maybe at least > slightly better than nothing. > Thanks! I'd completely glossed over eBay even though I'm pretty sure that listing showed up in my google searches. I guess I need to pay closer attention... The price is definitely right -- I'll get that scanned and sent off to Al. If anyone has any experience debugging these, do let me know. (I should also note that there is an R80 service manual on Bitsavers -- I misspoke (mistyped?) in my initial e-mail. It doesn't provide a lot of details on the drive's operation and I was hoping the RA80 or RM80 manuals might be more detailed...) Thanks again, - Josh
Re: Yahoo Groups going away
On 10/17/2019 8:02 PM, Ali via cctalk wrote: The groups are free as long as you use less than 1GB of storage. More storage costs. Unfortunately, since this past February, you also have to pay in order to have Groups.IO do the moving of your messages, files and photos. No freebie for that anymore. That explains it. BTW: is February when Yahoo first announced the shutdown of Yahoo Groups? Just wondering -Ali In the last couple of days. It seems to be a bad match to anything Verizon has any use for, and it's a shame they didn't find a way to spin it off. I suspect there is tons of intertwined infrastructure though to try to cleave it off to a really separate business. Thanks Jim