May the force be with you.

It certainly wasn’t with me last month.  I did not manage one line of code on my actual project; not even long hand on paper.

Right after the last post, I came down sick.  Now I have to pick it up and get it together.

As of my last post I hadn’t even decided what to do for a game. Two games that I played in the past, came to mind.  I played Hammurabi on the PDP 11/70.  Star Merchant was another game I came across.  Both have possibilities, and apparently Creative Computing agreed about Hammurabi, because they published Dukedom, which was supposed to be a multiplayer version, although I never quite got it to work that way.

That leaves me with Star Merchant.  This would have been my first choice anyway, but I was concerned it might be to complicated to the short amount of time to work with.  Dukedom and Star Merchant were both published in the book, Big Computer Games in 1984.

Star Merchant is a game where you as captain, take your starship in a trade route of your choice between ten different star systems.  At each star system you buy and sell cargo in the attempt to gain a profit.

The original single player version from Creative Computing has been typed in and can be run on my emulated PDP 11/70.  Once you are signed on you can run it by entering:

RUN !STMRCH

Last Update: 01-Apr-18

I spent the last few days working on what I call recipes. They are short documents explaining how to do things. In this case I set up recipes for logging in, logging out and getting around RSTS/E.

A final recipe is actually just a list of telnet clients that I have used.

For this RetroChallenge I plan to write a multiplayer game that will run on an emulated PDP 11/70.

The first computer I ever used or worked on was a PDP 11/70 in High School. The main operating system when I had access to it was RSTS/E. The version back then was V06B and later V06C. I have had a fascination with the system ever since. Over the years I have run emulations of the PDP 11/70 under SimH and recently under Ersatz-11. The closest version of RSTS/E I have been able to setup is V7.0-07, so that is the version I will use.

On past RetroChallenges, I have seen some that in addition to following along reading the blog posts, it would be interesting to get hands on as well.

With that in mind, I have set up separate accounts in my emulated system to store my work and make it available to play with as I go along. The emulated system can be reached with telnet at: puff dot mooo dot com at port 4000. Once you connect you can log in with the account number 17,4 and password of RC. I’ll post a recipe above shortly showing how to get around in RSTS/E.