from http://forums.scummvm.org/viewtopic.php?t=3264&sid=598fbe4c2f24c3e9e9169d43a570de72 AlanCox Wed Mar 23, 2016 2:00 am -------------------------------- So in a bid to break the record for the most ancient thread resurrection from things found via Google. AberMUD went through several iterations AberMUD in B on a Honeywell L66 mainframe (believed lost) - deeply 'strange' a mix of everything from fantasy to sci-fi and student humour. It actually started life as a chat system which them grew 'rooms' for people to talk in and then exits between them and then it got out of hand. AberMUD II in C on Unix as a conversion of this (which somewhere along the line became AberMUD III with a scenario change to a vaguely sensible fantasy setting). A version of that ended up in Finland and then the USA (which was no mean feat back then - it was considered 'too big' to by posted to comp.sources on USENET. Quite how it got there is a fun saga in itself but I'm not sure what the statute of limitations is for Finland  ) Rich $alz ended up releasing a version of that as AberMUD 4 which is what most US AberMUDs were based on. Meanwhile I wrote parts of AberMUD IV on an Amiga which then suffered a terminal and catastrophic existence failure when all the disks holding it fell into the sea. Salt water and floppies - not good. Somewhat later I started AberMUD V again on the Amiga and this was fairly well developed and working nicely when I re-joined AdventureSoft(*). At AdventureSoft I wrote a new text game engine for Personal Nightmare. It was incredibly powerful and sufficiently like a real programming language that the non-programming games writers really couldn't cope with it. The graphics side (most of which was not mine) was rather more successful. Elvira is a fork of AberMUD V with some extra handling for GUI features and roughly speaking the same graphics engine as Personal Nightmare. After I left it also got other extensions. You don't really see a lot of what the AberMUD V engine can do in the Elvira games. For obvious reasons stuff like live in game editing aren't part of the released game, but the entire game was written within the game. Later on back at university I wrote YAMA (a tiny engine capable of running a 16 user MUD on a 8086 PC) and then various new AberMUD V versions from the code pre Horrorsoft. One other question often asked was which platform was first. The engines and game were written on the Amiga, but in terms of actual 'release' I don't honestly think there was a "first". The game engine was portable while the graphics were done basically in parallel. Thankfully I didn't have to touch the PC graphics! Alan (*) As Adventure International (UK) I worked there first on work experience from college and then for real before I went to Unversity. Everything from TRS80 basic programs to format up the output of the old game editor/playing tool on the TRS80 for the assembler, to helping with German Gremlins (verb noun backwards), then graphics and text compression for Robin of Sherwood, bits for Seas of Blood (some graphics engine stuff, the crab graphic and oddments), Blizzard Pass (game and graphics), Demons of the Deep (never released and probably lost), and oddments like beta testing Kayleth (which was a joy of a task). (and yes the stories of that era of the games world are mostly true - the crazy people, the insane hours close to deadlines, hacking sample copy protected discs and handing them to the boss *during* the meeting with the people wanting to sell him the system)