[HN Gopher] 1991: Trade Wars 2002 ___________________________________________________________________ 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. ___________________________________________________________________ (page generated 2021-05-27 23:02 UTC)