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Found at: gopher.quux.org:70/Archives/usenet-a-news/NET.games/81.12.05_duke.1453_net.games.txt

Aduke.1453
net.games
utzoo!decvax!duke!bcw
Sat Dec  5 00:22:21 1981
Multi-player games
Subject: Multi-player games and Multi-user Star Trek under VAX/VMS
There is a multi-user Star Trek game which runs under VAX/VMS
(and RSX or IAS type PDP-11 operating systems) which first
appeared in the RSX/IAS DECUS SIG tape about three years ago.
I forget who wrote it originally, but it runs in real time (no
clock update every couple seconds or so, it's similar to one
of those arcade games).  It works substantially as described
in the previous news article, with the ability to play against
a number of "robot" ships (you can choose the number and the
skill of the robots) and against other humans.
The game originally ran under IAS but has been ported to a
number of other systems (probably multiple times).  One of the
local VMS hackers ported it to a VAX at the physics department
at Duke;  that version has gotten out (and probably several
dozen more versions ported elsewhere) and may be the version
seen by the author of the previous news item.
Porting it to Unix might present difficulties -- it uses a
named, shared region of memory to do all of its communication
between the different processes running (one per terminal).
Since it assumes it can modify this region and have all of
the world "see" it without having to do any i/o calls, this
would require some modification to fit into a Unix-like
scheme.  It is also unclear if the Unix scheme would work
satisfactorily because of the large amount of overhead it
would require in file updates -- the thing is extremely cpu-
intensive now, and can bring a VAX or a PDP-11/70 to its
knees all by itself.
			Bruce C. Wright @ Duke University
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 Bruce Jones, Henry Spencer, David Wiseman.


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