2 Feb
2023
2 Feb
'23
12:43 a.m.
segaloco wrote:
In the annals of UNIX gaming, have there ever been
notable games that
have operated as multiple processes, perhaps using formal IPC or even
just pipes or shared files for communication between separate processes
(games with networking notwithstanding)?
The machine of the DSSR/RTS group at MIT-LCS, Steve Ward's group (an -11/70
running roughly PWB1) had an implementation of a form of Perquackey:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perquackey
that was a multi-player game; I'm pretty sure there was a process per player,
and they communicated, I'm pretty sure, through pipes, not files - there was
certainly no IPC in that system.
IIIRC, the way it worked was that there was a parent process, and it spawned
a child process for each terminal that was playing, and the children could
all communicate through pipes. (They had to communicate because in that
version, all the players shared a single set of dice, and once one person had
played a word, the other players couldn't play that word. So speed was
important in playing; people got really addicted to it.)
Alas, although their machine was very similar to CSR's (although ours was an
-11/45 with an Able ENABLE and a lot of memory, making it a lot more like a
/70), and we shared most code between the machines, and I have a full dump of
the CSR machine, we apparently didn't have any of the games on the CSR
machine, so I can't look at the source to confirm exactly how it worked.
Noel