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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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