mirror of
https://git.zap.org.au/git/trader.git
synced 2024-12-04 14:46:45 -05:00
66 lines
3.2 KiB
Plaintext
66 lines
3.2 KiB
Plaintext
**************************************************************************
|
|
* *
|
|
* Star Traders: A Game of Interstellar Trading *
|
|
* Copyright (C) 1990-2011, John Zaitseff *
|
|
* *
|
|
**************************************************************************
|
|
|
|
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 7.0 (not yet released)
|
|
------------------------------
|
|
|
|
Released the first version of Star Traders for Unix-like operating systems
|
|
such as Linux. It requires a text console of at least 80x24 in size. The
|
|
code is written in the C 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.
|
|
|
|
|
|
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"
|
|
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.
|
|
|
|
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...
|