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From: falk%peregrine@Sun.COM (Ed Falk)
Newsgroups: net.sources.games
Subject: Re: VMS Empire: Clarification
Message-ID: <10718@sun.uucp>
Date: Sat, 20-Dec-86 22:07:40 EST
Article-I.D.: sun.10718
Posted: Sat Dec 20 22:07:40 1986
Date-Received: Sun, 21-Dec-86 03:40:20 EST
References: <1180@ucbcad.BERKELEY.EDU>
Sender: news@sun.uucp
Reply-To: falk@sun.UUCP (Ed Falk)
Organization: Sun Microsystems, Mountain View
Lines: 22

>Sorry for the confusion about VMS Empire.  The game was originally
>written for VMS, but the version I posted has been hacked to work
>under 4BSD UNIX for Vaxes.  It is a human-vs-computer game released
>through DECUS.
>
Great game.  I used to play it all the time on Data General machines.

I couldn't get it to work on Suns though.  It was very poorly written and had
many hardware dependencies.  In particular, it would often put a value between
0-255 in an integer*4 and pass it to a subroutine that expected character*1.
This means it only works on machines that address bytes within a word from low
to high and which pass character variables by single address (i.e. only Dec).

There were also problems with curses and I finally gave up.

I realize this isn't Ed James' fault, but does anyone have a version that works
on a better variety of hardware?


		-ed falk, sun microsystems
terrorist, cryptography, DES, drugs, cipher, secret, decode, NSA, CIA, NRO.
(The above is food for the NSA line eater.)