trader/NEWS

**************************************************************************
*                                                                        *
*              Star Traders: A Game of Interstellar Trading              *
*                 Copyright (C) 1990-2011, John Zaitseff                 *
*                                                                        *
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Star Traders is a simple game of interstellar trading, where the objective
is to  create companies, buy and  sell shares, borrow and  repay money, in
order to become the wealthiest player (the winner).

The following history is presented in reverse chronological order.  If you
would like to  see a list of detailed changes to  this project, you should
consult the Subversion repository for "trader" on The ZAP Group web server
at http://www.zap.org.au/services/svn/.


Version 7.1 (29th July, 2011)
-----------------------------

A minor updated  release to fix configuration problems  on some platforms.
In particular, some systems could  not find the Curses libraries or header
files, so the  Autoconf macro that performed the  search was rewritten and
extended.


Version 7.0 (25th July, 2011)
-----------------------------

Released the first version of Star Traders for Unix-like operating systems
such as Linux.  It requires a text  console or window of at least 80x24 in
size.  The code is written  in the C99 programming  language as a learning
exercise for a  number of software tools and  libraries; the algorithms in
the  original Pascal and  Visual Basic  versions are  reused for  the game
logic.

Note that the current version of Star Traders does NOT handle locales with
multibyte character sequences  (such as UTF-8) correctly.  Each  byte in a
multibyte sequence is treated  as a separate character.  Eight-bit locales
(such as US-ASCII, ISO8859-1, etc.) work correctly.


Early history
-------------

The original (and very primitive) Star Traders game  was written  by S. J.
Singer in 1984 using Altair  Basic.  This was modified for Microsoft Basic
(MBASIC) running under  the CP/M-80 operating system by  John Zaitseff and
released on 7th March, 1988.

Star Traders  was then  completely rewritten in  1990 for  the Australian-
designed 8-bit MicroBee computer running CP/M-80 on a Zilog Z80 processor,
using Turbo Pascal 3.01a.  Essentially, only the name of the game and some
of the ideas  were retained in this version.  Version 4.1  of Star Traders
was released on 1st August, 1991.

In 1992,  it was recompiled for  the NEC Advanced  Personal Computer (with
8-inch floppy drives!)  running CP/M-86  on an 8086 processor, using Turbo
Pascal  2.0.  This version  had colour  added to  it in  the form  of ANSI
escape sequences; version 4.4 was released on 2nd August, 1993.

The next version  came in 1993, when the program was  recompiled to run on
IBM-compatible machines running MS-DOS and ANSI.SYS.  Turbo Pascal 6.0 was
used for  this.  The ANSI  escape sequences were slightly  different under
MS-DOS than  under the NEC,  in that the  NEC supported a number  of extra
character  attributes.  In other  words, the  MS-DOS version  looked worse
than the one running under CP/M-86!

Star Traders was recompiled again in 1994 for IBM-compatible machines with
VGA/EGA/CGA video graphics adapters.   The output routines were recoded to
use  a "windowed" look.   Borland Pascal  7.0 was  used for  this purpose,
along with a number of  text window manipulation modules.  Version 5.4 was
released on 1st June, 1994.

In 1995,  Star Traders was  completely rewritten for the  16-bit Microsoft
Windows 3.1  graphical environment.  Microsoft  Visual Basic 3.0  was used
for this purpose.  Although  completely rewritten, the original algorithms
were reused from previous versions.   Version 6.0 of the game was released
on 15th September, 1995.

Star Traders was then to languish until almost 16 years later...