The final shareware version (2.6) was fairly comparable to the retail version (2.7). This says the shareware version just lacked some sound effects...? https://web.archive.org/web/20091129230733/http://wiki.gible...

However, I believe the first shareware version I had was 1.x (distributed via CD that was packed full of shareware) which was significantly different. I remember mining fuel, which tracks with the above link.

Stars! was one of my very first video game purchases. I remember mailing a money order, and recieving a copy in the mail - I didn't have internet at the time. I'm not sure I even knew the internet existed then, although I would soon after if not.

AFAIK this was the case. I played a lot of Stars! (almost exclusively the shareware) and it had all the races and tech trees. It showed higher level tech trees but those were only available in the registered game. Map sizes were also limited in the shareware. Later versions might have required additional resources for the retail upgrade but I believe the version I had (2.5?) could become the full registered copy with just a key.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

It had so many strategic choices, giving it a depth that would surprise most modern gamers seeing it for the first time. Starting with the race design, where your choices can make or break your game. Choose wisely! Then there's ship design, which is a whole other layer of possibilities.

Plus, the fact that you can fly anywhere through space, not just through artificially-constrained wormholes, means that the strategy of attacking another player can involve a lot of subtlety and bluffing. Fly a medium-sized fleet into deep space, skirting the edge of his scanner range, while you fly a big fleet directly towards his key production worlds. Then on the turn when he is expecting you to reach his worlds and start bombing (and when you think he's going to send his ships to intercept yours), turn your big fleet around and fly it home. Meanwhile, fly your smaller, pre-positioned fleet in from the other side of his empire. His ships will be caught out of position as they'll follow their orders to chase your fleet, a lot farther than he thought they would in one turn, and they won't get back to the other side of his empire in time to prevent you doing a lot of damage. Then, when he's not paying attention to your big fleet, turn it around AGAIN and do even more damage.

There are ways to counter that, of course, but it's easy to catch people off-guard if they haven't noticed yet that you can send ships anywhere, not just between two planets.

What an excellent game that was. I'm so glad it's possible to play it again.

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

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

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.

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.

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).

see also Spaceward Ho!

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.

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...

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.

I never thought I'd see someone else in the wild who remembers Stars! Next we'll be talking about Anacreon and Talisman.

Now if someone could publish a patch that overcomes the 10,000 fleet identifier limit!

Oh my God, I thought I was the only one who remembered this game!