[HN Gopher] 1991: Trade Wars 2002
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1991: Trade Wars 2002
Author : TheLocehiliosan
Score : 67 points
Date : 2021-05-27 11:04 UTC (11 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (if50.substack.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (if50.substack.com)
| xenophonf wrote:
| TradeWars 2002 is alive and well! Star Killer's server is
| probably my favorite place to play:
|
| http://www.oregonsouth.com/ice9/
|
| Tools like TWXProxy and Mombot still see frequent updates:
|
| https://github.com/MicroBlaster/TWXProxy
|
| SWATH, despite its age, works great (nowadays I use it for very
| simple macros and as a front end to TWXProxy):
|
| http://swath.net/
|
| Tournament-level play is incredible. Deep strategy, full
| automation. You definitely do not warp around willy-nilly unless
| you want a planet full of photon missiles and quasar cannons
| dropped on your head. Sure, the ANSI graphics means you have to
| use your imagination a little more than in EVE, but if anything,
| that makes it _more_ fun for me.
| korethr wrote:
| > You definitely do not warp around willy-nilly unless you want
| a planet full of photon missiles and quasar cannons dropped on
| your head.
|
| Oh, god. Don't remind me. I'm there, happily minding my own
| business, trading between ports in adjacent systems, and in
| warps a volcanic class planet with a level 6 citadel. Fucking
| death stars.
|
| You wanna blast me, a hapless newb who stumbled into your
| territory, out of the sky, fine. But running the interdictor
| generator is just being mean about it. :P
| pwned1 wrote:
| OMG. I hosted a BBS with TW2002 and purchased the license way
| back when. It's still available from the original author:
| https://eisonline.classictw.com/
|
| It looks like a lot of sites are still hosting it. On man, so
| many memories of the BBS days.
| evanelias wrote:
| Minor correction, the original author (Gary Martin) sold the
| rights to TW2002 to the current owner/developer (John
| Pritchett) in 1998.
|
| Edit: actually it was 2000. Wikipedia mistakenly says 1998, but
| that was when John first got involved in the project.
| _marlowe_ wrote:
| Lived in TW2002 on Atlantis BBS for the better part of 2 years.
| Good times.
| lonelygirl15a wrote:
| I found awk for DOS on a BBS, and used it to help my TW play.
| When getting into a newly generated map, I'd spend the first
| night or two moving around as much as possible, logging the
| session in the terminal program (ProComm?).
|
| Then I'd run the log through an awk script to print out a map.
| boboche wrote:
| Empire on C64, tradewars and global war (risk) were so much fun
| back in the golden age of BBses.
|
| Funny coincidence as I was searching exactly tradewars on my ipad
| a week ago to see if there was something similar. I'm being
| nostalgic nowadays, if someone has any suggestions for android or
| iOS games, store searches are usually not returning small gems.
| korethr wrote:
| Well, this a nostalgic article for me.
|
| I first started dialing into bulletin boards as a tween, on a 386
| (and later a 486) cobbled together from bits scrounged from
| garage sales and the e-waste from the various businesses of my
| parent's friends or friends of friends. I eventually came into an
| 8-bit ISA modem, and upon recognizing what it was, added it into
| my computer, and snuck a telephone cable from an open jack into
| my room. I found the BBS listings in a local computer magazine
| and and started dialing out, exploring my area code. To be
| honest, I don't recall how I got the terminal program I initially
| used; I just recall that it was bare-bones and kinda janky. As a
| kid, you bet your sweet ass I went straight for the games section
| if there was one. And there I discovered TW:2002 and Legend Of
| the Red Dragon.
|
| The sysop of one of the boards I dialed into noticed I was
| connecting at 2400bps at a time when 28.8k and 33.6 were
| commonplace. He pulled me into sysop chat to ask what was up and
| I explained my situation with my computer being cobbled together
| from scrap. He offered to send me a newer modem as well as some
| terminal software that didn't suck, and so I gave him my mailing
| address. I don't recall if I got my parents' permission to do so.
| In either case, a week or so later package showed up in the mail
| with a 16-bit ISA 14.4k modem and a floppy disk with a terminal
| program that indeed didn't suck. And with connection speeds that
| didn't cause a full screen of ANSI art take minutes to load, line
| by painful line, TradeWars became _much_ more playable.
|
| I logged many hours in TW:2002 through middle school and early
| high school. The holy grail I heard about, but initially couldn't
| play, were those really fancy BBSes that had multiple lines and
| the latest version that let you play against other players at the
| same time. Those were fancier operations where you had to pay
| monies for your dial-in time, which was not a particularly
| feasible thing when you're not even old enough to have a job,
| much less a bank account. It until wasn't towards the end of high
| school when I found a few sites offering connections over telnet
| that I got to experience multi-player play. And promptly learned
| just how bad of a player I'd been all that time.
|
| A back-burnered project still intend to get to is to set up a
| retro system to run a multi-line (or maybe even network
| connected!) BBS, with all the various classic games of that era,
| including TW:2002.
| friedegg wrote:
| I still remember one particular game in the mid-90s where there
| was basically a corporation of several "evil" players vs. me and
| another "good" player. We eventually played to a stalemate where
| neither side was going to get a clear victory.
| redm wrote:
| What fond memories I have of playing and hosting a TW2002 (and
| BRE) BBS in the early 90's. I find though, trying to revisit
| those fond memories is a mistake, they never live up to the
| original experience because the world has evolved, and so have I.
| dailo10 wrote:
| I would love to read an article about BRE and SRE. :)
| jmkb wrote:
| Hah, this was my jam in the day. I wrote mods and utilities,
| custom map generators, custom ship types, fixed a lot of bugs
| that cheaters would use. Stepped through the code in an assembly
| language debugger and reverse engineered all the data files.
|
| One of my favorite memories was fixing a cheater's bug that was
| triggered by entering a negative number into a certain dialog.
| There were no legitimate features in the game that required
| negative numbers, so I figured if I could prevent the entry of
| _all_ negative numbers, it would fix this bug plus any similar
| undiscovered ones. I was very much an assembly language novice,
| but I knew that somewhere in that executable had to be the
| routine that parsed ASCII strings to convert them to integers,
| and it most likely had the minus sign (ASCII value 45) encoded as
| a constant. I stubbornly changed each byte value 45 to 255 until
| I found the right one. Since it wasn 't possible to enter ASCII
| 255 in the dialogs... bug fixed!
|
| When Gary Martin finally released a new version (2112?), the
| executables and data files were all encrypted, so we couldn't
| make custom ships anymore. I wasn't able to crack the encryption
| but I wrote a "TSR" (=terminate and stay resident -- DOS's
| approximation of multi-tasking) that would wait for the Trade
| Wars program to unpack itself and then write patches directly
| into the RAM. Good times.
| sneak wrote:
| Sometimes I miss the days before protected memory.
| [deleted]
| Jemaclus wrote:
| I've been working on a version of TW2002 in Go for awhile now.
| What I keep getting stuck on is the economics! Does anyone have
| any thoughts on how the calculations work as far as supply/demand
| and prices between ports? I've got a really naive implementation
| now, but i'd like something as close to the original as possible.
|
| Similar question for combat stuff, but I haven't gotten that far
| in my build yet...
| zwily wrote:
| Reading this brought back so many good memories.
| Jeema101 wrote:
| Man. I used to play the heck out of Tradewars back in the day on
| local BBSes.
|
| I distinctly remember logging in one day on a certain BBS I
| played on only to realize one of my corporation partners had
| robbed the corporation blind and left us all floating in space.
|
| But getting betrayed and then becoming a fugitive from your
| former partner, and then plotting your comeback, was all part of
| the game ...and ultimately fun in it's own right I suppose. :)
| Good times.
| fouc wrote:
| Anyone remember Telemate and the macros it supported? So great
| for connecting to BBSes and playing games like TW2002
| mgolawala wrote:
| People who have fond memories of playing Trade Wars when they
| were younger should check out EVE Online
| (https://www.eveonline.com/)
|
| There are enough similarities that I would find it hard to
| believe that EVE Online was not, at the very least, influenced by
| Trade Wars.
| walrus01 wrote:
| a spreadsheet and corporate espionage simulator masquerading as
| a spaceship video game...
| anonymousiam wrote:
| I recall this game as a "door" from a dial-up BBS. I spent part
| of a summer building my empire and then dialed in one day to find
| that it had been attacked and destroyed. I was pretty depressed
| about that so I wrote a note to the sysop (a guy I knew and
| worked with). My note was about sportsmanship and good will, and
| how the destruction of my empire did not represent those values.
| I asked the sysop to please pass on the note to the other player.
| The terse response that I got back from the sysop was; "Your
| message was properly addressed."
| rblatz wrote:
| I played so much of this in my youth, I remember finding an
| awesome helper programs that would help you keep track of the
| discovered universe, build maps, and keep track of good trading
| routes.
| j4yav wrote:
| What a great game. A modern version that kept the simple and pvp
| nature of the original game would be cool.
| polpo wrote:
| The great thing about TW2002 is that it was simple on the
| surface, which made it accessible. You could have fun warping
| around, trading goods, but then eventually you'd start digging
| and find the incredible depth in the game. The first time I
| stumbled on the Starbase blew my mind, and it just kept on
| going from there. Getting a Federal Commission (or going evil),
| terraforming planets, building citadels, finding dead ends in
| space to set up your planet, setting up corporations...
| xen2xen1 wrote:
| And now I'm going to have to set it up in docker again.. I
| only remember some of that.
| sseagull wrote:
| Oh man, I mentioned the time limits in my other comment. But
| citadels and stuff took sooooo long. Depending on your setup,
| it could be months until everything was built up. I remember
| impatiently checking the countdown on my citadels (28 days,
| 27 days, 26 days,...)
| sseagull wrote:
| One aspect of TW that I feel would be missing from any modern
| reincarnation would be the time limit you usually had on a BBS.
| Only being able to play for a set time a day is basically
| unheard of now. But it made you want to play it all the more,
| and I couldn't wait until the next morning when my time
| allotment was refreshed :)
|
| I kind of wish this was true nowadays. I don't have hours and
| hours to play anymore, and so tend to avoid multiplayer online
| since the playing field is heavily tilted to those who have
| lots of time to play. That was somewhat less of an issue in the
| BBS days (on my BBS, anyway).
|
| (Plus, a BBS might also periodically delete the universe and
| start over (a big bang!) which would again level the playing
| field for a bit.
|
| Edit: Just remembered, in addition to the time limit on the
| BBS, you also had a specified number of 'turns' in the game. So
| you really had to plan sometimes. (and bigger ships took more
| turns to move per sector...)
| Jiocus wrote:
| > I kind of wish this was true nowadays. I don't have hours
| and hours to play anymore, and so tend to avoid multiplayer
| online since the playing field is heavily tilted to those who
| have lots of time to play.
|
| Have you considered EVE Online? So many aspects of playing is
| your character carrying out processes and awaiting countdowns
| for hours and days - months even, even when you're away.
| fma wrote:
| LOL yeah if I recall I'd have different accounts (I think
| that was frowned upon?) and play on different BBSes to get my
| 'hit' :)
|
| I'd remember the days getting stuck in the middle of no where
| when I'm out of turns and you hope no one comes across you
| and attack you.
|
| I was in middle school/high school when I played this
| game...and I'd tie up the house line. Even if I had no turns
| somethings I'd hang around and chat on the conference with
| people.
|
| I played a lot on the BBS Family Entertainment (Fament?) I
| believe...I think that group is still playing and Cruncher is
| still pretty involved and hosts games.
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(page generated 2021-05-27 23:02 UTC)