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Re: T-WARP for Tradewars

Posted: Wed Mar 24, 2021 9:53 pm
by C64_Coder
Hi Milton (and others).

I am the "Andy" from the dev team for Nth Degree (wow, that was so long ago!).
Yep, I wrote TWarped, the biggest market was for Galacticom BBS's.

I will try to find the source for the project. If I can, I'll gladly share it so you can update it. I have gobs of old HD's. I've also had the habit of when upgrading a computer or HD, I just copy the old one into a directory called C:\OldDriveC. Inside that, there is another OldDrive C. So there is a chance I'll find the source. If not, I can share the logic and it can be recreated.

Thanks for thinking of an old product from 25 years ago! And yes, Tradewars is still one of my all time favorite games to this day.

Andy

Re: T-WARP for Tradewars

Posted: Wed Mar 24, 2021 10:26 pm
by Duckula
Hi Andy - great to have you here! We are always looking for old source code to preserve and it would be great to see what is hidden away on those old hard drives.

We are also looking for C developers to help work on our upgrade to Major BBS V10 so of you are interested in helping, please send me a message!

Re: T-WARP for Tradewars

Posted: Wed Mar 24, 2021 11:37 pm
by C64_Coder
I took a look in the garage where my hard drive graveyard is. I have 14 IDE drives (they'll have the 1990's to early 2000's stuff). One shows a mfg date of 1990, probably 100 to 200 meg, so that is definitely a contender. I likely have some stuff in there that may be useful including the dev system from back then. I had the Major BBS dev kit back then (big binder with lots of everything), but i'm pretty sure that got land filled 20 years ago in one of my purges. I ordered an IDE to UBS off of Amazon and will have a look to see what I can find. I'm a bit of a data pack rat, so there is a decent chance here. I think I have a copy of the Turbo Pascal source for TW2002 in there somewhere as well.

For spare time, I don't have much but can assist a bit when possible (old school C coder). If I remember correctly there was a bit of skull duggery required by Major BBS and the modules to deal with memory and context switching. BTrieve comes to mind as well. For 3rd party module development, the life cycle was super important as the computer didn't have a lot of clock cycles and you would be serving a big rack of modems. I used to be a game sysop back then, so spent plenty of time helping setup BBS's with gobs of modems (ie: 24 modems bolted to a 486). Major BBS handled these situation better than any other BBS software.

Re: T-WARP for Tradewars

Posted: Thu Mar 25, 2021 12:26 am
by Duckula
Yes, Btrieve is still in there however we are moving from Borland compiled to MSVC for MBBS v10. Send me a PM if you are interested in helping.

Re: T-WARP for Tradewars

Posted: Wed Apr 07, 2021 7:15 pm
by BadOPCode
nessenj wrote:
> Questman wrote:
>
> > Metro isn't gone, exactly. They aren't actively developing anything. I
> > thought they'd at least sell LORD to Presslar - he did all the work for
> > them on it (except for the initial port to WG3). But yeah, they own it.
>
> They aren't?? Are they actually supporting anything? I've sent a few emails to them
> inquiring about MajorMUD and have yet to hear anything back from them. Even tried a
> few different email addresses.

To be realistic ... they are gone. The last address given "to mail checks to" is a home address for Lindsey (a original Metro investor that primarily does real estate) WHICH she has put that house up for sell. Why she won't just sell the software she owns... no clue. Seth Able Robinson (original author) has recently been trying to buy the rights back to all the RT Software games. He has stated that he still has the original source code... so this eliminates the rumor of a lost hard drive. Why maintain websites and refuse to sell any license is the mystery. All I can come up with is the value of the software has been grossly exaggerated and than used as collateral on a loan and so it can't legally be sold. The actual money it could generate is not enough to keep her interest and be bothered with... but can't just dump the websites as it legally would be viewed as sabotaging a franchise. That's my guess on their VERY strange behavior.

Re: T-WARP for Tradewars

Posted: Thu Apr 08, 2021 1:55 pm
by Questman
ALL of their source is safe - I know this PERSONALLY - with the only ambiguity being The Rose, Blood Rites, and MajorMUD. Everything else is just waiting for the OK to move forward.

Lindsey doesn't own it, her father does I think.