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From: tsf@druxn.UUCP (FisherTS)
Newsgroups: net.games.emp
Subject: Old Empire
Message-ID: <1221@druxn.UUCP>
Date: Mon, 24-Jun-85 18:42:39 EDT
Article-I.D.: druxn.1221
Posted: Mon Jun 24 18:42:39 1985
Date-Received: Tue, 25-Jun-85 03:45:05 EDT
Organization: AT&T Information Systems Laboratories, Denver
Lines: 53

Version 1.0 Old Empire source (!!) is ready for distribution.

Old Empire is a version of Peter Langston's empire game as it looked
around 1980.  The source for this version was obtained by
decompiling the optimized PDP-11/70 object code.  All of this started
as an experiment to see how far one could go with the decompiling
process, and since I am an incurable empire addict, I used the
empire binaries as test input.

The empire source is about 11K lines of C.  The output from the
decompiler is ugly and shouldn't be discussed in front of young kids.
There are zillion goto statements where you would normally find
'for' and 'while' loops (I straightened a few things out when doing
the final editing of the decompiler output, but there are still a lot
of goto's).  There might be a few "original" bugs left, but I suspect
there are an equal number introduced by the decompilation and triple
porting operations.

This version has the orthogonal grid, unimplemented agribusiness, no
nukes, and only the original 7 ship types (batt, carr, dest, sub, tend,
pt, and freight).  No new bells or whistles have been added.  In fact,
every effort was made to restore the game to its original condition,
but with bugs exterminated.

The distribution comes with Buglist and README files.  I can post the
Buglist to the net if people want to see it.  It runs on a 5.0 VAX,
5.2 Amdahl UTS, and 5.2.2 3b.  The makefiles aren't the greatest, but I
find them useful.

I checked with Peter to get his OK before offering this distribution.
Please direct all Old Empire flames and bug reports to me.  I'll
respond to bug reports as I find time.  If there are enough reported,
there might be a Version 1.1 by this fall.  I don't know of any "spoiler"
bugs in this version.  (My next article will be addressing something that
some folks might call a bug, some call it a feature of Old Empire).

If you want this fine antique, send a S.A.S.T to
	Tom Fisher
	AT&T-ISL Room 31G32
	11900 N. Pecos St.
	Denver, CO 80234

- and please be patient.

If you are on a AT&T-BTL or ISL usend node, I would rather use the
network - I can only do a couple tapes a week.  I will post the names
of those that I send a copy to so you can try to get a copy quicker from
a closer source.  The package is about 400Kbytes long.  I would be grateful
to anyone offering suggestion on how to do this efficiently.

[4:253] Command : bye

Tom Fisher	ihnp4!druxn!tsf		(303)-538-4642