So with a working Ultrix machine on which I can chat on irc, send and receive email, and read and respond to newsgroups, I needed something idle to do to pass the time once there were no more messages to read and respond to and all my irc buddies were busy with real life.
I needed some games.
In my humble opinion, no computer is complete without an install of “Colossal Cave Adventure”, “Dungeon”, or “Zork”…all largely the same name for a text based adventure where you explore the underground and are in danger of getting eaten by a Gru.
This game is still maintained and available in the bsd-games package on most bsd and linux distributions. Needless to say, the modern source would not build on this old Unix with GCC 3.0.4. I had to find something older and cruftier.
Eventually I dug up some Fortran source code, which was originally ported to the VAX using Fortran. This particular source blob I found, had a build script, which eschewed the Fortran compiler for the f2c (Fortran to c) utility available with early (but not 3.0.4 early) versions of gcc. Taking a look at the build script, I figured I could just build and assemble the Fortran directly with g77.
Indeed, this worked out almost perfectly, I only had to make a couple changes for a particular function which really wanted for an array, rather than individual variables. Thankfully, creating empty array to pass to the function, then updating the code to reference the array elements was pretty trivial.
Once that was one, I compiled it and I had a running dungeon! I then looked at the install script which was totally incorrect for the directory layout on this system. Rather than fixing the script, I just moved the couple things around manually. Now any user can run, save and load a game, success!
The second game, which I un-ironically fell in love with a couple years ago on my Tandy 16 Xenix machine is Star Trek. A mostly text based simulation with some quadrant maps drawn in ASCII art. Once you get used to the controls, it’s really quite engaging…and surprisingly difficult to vanquish your Klingon Enemies.
This is another game, that has been modernized and kept up to date for you to easily compile and run on your modern *nix system. So I went searching. I ended up finding an old source tarball of bsd-games-1.3.
The build script for this lives at the top level, you run the configure script which asks you all sorts of questions about paths and which of the two dozen games in the collection you want to build. Then it goes ahead and creates a Makefile in each subdir that you’re planning on building. The script then fails to work correctly.
Thankfully, editing the generated Makefile in the trek directory to ignore some of the net-bsd specific libraries it was looking for and simply running make in the trek subdir resulted in a runnable trek executable. Again, I manually put the executable and two different man pages in place as the install script was completely incorrect as to the directory layout of this machine.
So that’s it, I now have to the two most essential (and period correct) games on the Ultrix DECstation. I call that a win!
As I’m spending more and more time on this machine, I’m wondering what I should put on it next.
—
Sent from my Personal DECstation 5000/25
