Astro Hacker News - A custom virtual machine for the Stars 4X game

programd |next [-]

The star map screenshot looks very similar to star map in "Remnants of the Precursors" [1], which is a modernization of 1993 "Master of Orion" [2]. Convergent evolution, or was 1995 Stars! an homage/clone of Orion?

1. https://rayfowler.itch.io/remnants-of-the-precursors

2. https://store.steampowered.com/app/410970/Master_of_Orion_1/

Hussell |root |parent |next [-]

Remnants of the Precursors resembles Stars!, but Stars! doesn't seem to much resemble Master of Orion 1 or 2. Seems to be convergent evolution. If I recall correctly, there were many similar 4X in space games at the time, and Master of Orion 1 didn't stand out much - it was Master of Orion II that was a big hit, relatively speaking (4X in space were/are a bit niche).

Majromax |root |parent |next |previous [-]

I can't speak for the authors' mindsets, but the Stars! map had pointwise movement rather than via strict stellar/planetary waypoints. When fleet interceptions can happen midcourse[1], there's not a whole lot of design room within the Win16 style.

[1] — If I remember correctly, there even was some special-case code for ship pursuit cycles.

tomsonj |root |parent |previous [-]

philipov |next |previous [-]

Wow, Stars! I loved this game so much as a child. Back then, after upgrading from shareware I had to wait for a floppy disk to arrive in the mail.

Majromax |root |parent [-]

Wasn't the shareware version fully featured, such that only the key was necessary?

em3rgent0rdr |next |previous [-]

> the authors couldn’t afford to build a sloppy, wasteful UI, and so by modern standards the game UI is remarkably fast and responsive. They don’t make ‘em like they used to.

I also miss this aspect of old windows games. "Castle of the Wind" the RPG is another example of a game that unashamedly uses Windows' built-in UI elements just fine. I wish more games just stuck to them. Then things like pressing tab to cycle focus to different UI elements still works and developers wouldn't have to worry about introducing bugs in their custom UIs.

breakingcups |next |previous [-]

> I’m distributing 32-bit builds (but requires SSE2) because there’s no advantage to 64-bit here, and these builds work (almost) everywhere

Kinda ironic given the article's subject of 16-bit mode no longer being available...

BSTRhino |next |previous [-]

I loved this game back in the day and was looking for a way to play it just last month! I will definitely be trying this.

philsnow |next |previous [-]

I kind of wish i had tried this when i was younger, but VGA Planets got hold of me first and teenage me apparently had stupid video game tribalism

DrHungers |next |previous [-]

Stars is a great game. Its a bit dated now, but still has a lot of charm, is fun and interesting and nobody's quite made a game like it (actually they probably have I just don't know about it).

Telaneo |next |previous [-]

Very neat! I hope we'll see more of this kind of work. Most games are well-behaved enough to simply run in Dosbox, an emulator, or through Wine, but there are a few tough nuts there that either need a very specific config, or just actual hardware. Having a known good config wrapped up in a VM seems like a great solution.

Espressosaurus |next |previous [-]

A pity Supernova was never finished. Stars! Without all the Econ micromanagement would have gotten rid of one of the bigger mechanical advantages someone with a lot of patience had.

nullsmack |next |previous [-]

oh wow, idk where I got it from but I had a zip file of this game back in the later 90s. It might've come from one of the shareware cds I bought back then.

unsnap_biceps |next |previous [-]

I loved stars! and really wish that it gets reimagined for the modern age. Stellaris gets way too micro-managing to be fun IMHO.

bigyabai |root |parent [-]

You should try Aurora 4X, if you haven't. Not quite a full reimagining, but still oodles of fun.

krige |next |previous [-]

Absolutely amazing. Can't wait to send out potato bugs and assemble scouts.

Fervicus |next |previous [-]

Blast from the past. Used to love playing this game as a kid.

jauntywundrkind |previous [-]

I forget whether it was steam or GE-Proton I ran it under but ran just fine on Linux. Have to say, I did crash out after 40 turns though, which is ridiculous, after thinking so much about Stars! for so long.

News here: there's an MCP server!! Oh snap!! This is great. I really love the idea of games that have external interfaces. There's a ton of tiny macro to stars, and being able to say, get every warship in the sector over to that planet at the same time with efficient fuel usage would be a lovely awesome thing to watch happen.

I look forward to more and more games having MCP (or other external interfaces). I'm sure there's others out there already, but definitely happy to see Stars! pointing the way forward yet again, decades latter.

tetha |root |parent [-]

It's funny. My experience of running Win95-Era Games, especially more wonky one like Cavelands on Linux with Wine is far better than on Windows. And DosBox is a given. So e.g. both Civ 2 and Civ 1 are just standard launchers on my Linux box.

And with something like Lutris, it's not a lot of tinkering. "Install game from setup.exe". Done in a lot of cases, needs a few winetricks or dll overrides in some cases for the wonky ones.