2011-06-14 02:55:20 -04:00
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**************************************************************************
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* *
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* Star Traders: A Game of Interstellar Trading *
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* Copyright (C) 1990-2011, John Zaitseff *
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* *
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**************************************************************************
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Star Traders is a simple game of interstellar trading, where the objective
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is to create companies, buy and sell shares, borrow and repay money, in
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order to become the wealthiest player (the winner).
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The following history is presented in reverse chronological order. If you
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would like to see a list of detailed changes to this project, you should
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consult the Subversion repository for "trader" on The ZAP Group web server
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at http://www.zap.org.au/services/svn/.
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Version 7.0 (not yet released)
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------------------------------
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Released the first version of Star Traders for Unix-like operating systems
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2011-07-22 06:28:08 -04:00
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such as Linux. It requires a text console or window of at least 80x24 in
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size. The code is written in the C programming language as a learning
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exercise for a number of software tools and libraries; the algorithms in
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the original Pascal and Visual Basic versions are reused for the game
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logic.
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2011-06-14 02:55:20 -04:00
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Early history
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-------------
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The original (and very primitive) Star Traders game was written by S. J.
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Singer in 1984 using Altair Basic. This was modified for Microsoft Basic
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(MBASIC) running under the CP/M-80 operating system by John Zaitseff and
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released on 7th March, 1988.
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Star Traders was then completely rewritten in 1990 for the Australian-
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designed 8-bit MicroBee computer running CP/M-80 on a Zilog Z80 processor,
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using Turbo Pascal 3.01a. Essentially, only the name of the game and some
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of the ideas were retained in this version. Version 4.1 of Star Traders
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was released on 1st August, 1991.
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In 1992, it was recompiled for the NEC Advanced Personal Computer (with 8"
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drives!) running CP/M-86 on an 8086 processor, using Turbo Pascal 2.0.
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This version had colour added to it in the form of ANSI escape sequences;
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version 4.4 was released on 2nd August, 1993.
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The next version came in 1993, when the program was recompiled to run on
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IBM-compatible machines running MS-DOS and ANSI.SYS. Turbo Pascal 6.0 was
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used for this. The ANSI escape sequences were slightly different under
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MS-DOS than under the NEC, in that the NEC supported a number of extra
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character attributes.
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Star Traders was recompiled again in 1994 for IBM-compatible machines with
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VGA/EGA/CGA video graphics adapters. The output routines were recoded to
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use a "windowed" look. Borland Pascal 7.0 was used for this purpose,
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along with a number of text window manipulation modules. Version 5.4 was
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released on 1st June, 1994.
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In 1995, Star Traders was completely rewritten for the 16-bit Microsoft
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Windows 3.1 graphical environment. Microsoft Visual Basic 3.0 was used
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for this purpose. Although completely rewritten, the original algorithms
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were reused from previous versions. Version 6.0 of the game was released
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on 15th September, 1995.
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Star Traders was then to languish until almost 16 years later...
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