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A custom virtual machine for the Stars 4X game

66 pointsby 2d agonullprogram.com
11 comments
3h agoHN ↗

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.

16m agoHN ↗

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

2h agoHN ↗

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.

2h agoHN ↗

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.

2h agoHN ↗

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

2h agoHN ↗

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

2h agoHN ↗

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.

2h agoHN ↗

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

1h agoHN ↗

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.

52m agoHN ↗

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).

36m agoHN ↗

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