Usurper Board

Sorry if this isn't a cool place to post.

I wanted to know if there was any other platforms supported by Usurper. I used to love the game, and want to set up one for my friends and I. I have access to things like FreeBSD and OSX. Is this only available in Windows or DOS? Are there any DOS emulators that anyone knows about? I don't have a bbs server program in mind yet, I was hoping when I found what some of my favorite games were supported under they would recommend one that would be supported by some unix platform.


Additionally, I'm looking for Legend of the Red Dragon, Land of Devastation. Any hints on how to get any of these things going on non-windows platforms would just make my day. (It was also my brother's birthday yesterday, he loved these.) Don't be shy if it seems hard to do, I will really appreciate it.



Also, hi and thanks for a great game.

outsider wrote:Sorry if this isn't a cool place to post.

I wanted to know if there was any other platforms supported by Usurper. I used to love the game, and want to set up one for my friends and I. I have access to things like FreeBSD and OSX. Is this only available in Windows or DOS? Are there any DOS emulators that anyone knows about? I don't have a bbs server program in mind yet, I was hoping when I found what some of my favorite games were supported under they would recommend one that would be supported by some unix platform.


Additionally, I'm looking for Legend of the Red Dragon, Land of Devastation. Any hints on how to get any of these things going on non-windows platforms would just make my day. (It was also my brother's birthday yesterday, he loved these.) Don't be shy if it seems hard to do, I will really appreciate it.



Also, hi and thanks for a great game.

As fer as aye be cocern, this doth be a grat place ta post thy question. noow fer Charles translation.

I haven't been able to do so, but I know some have succeded in running dos-emu with Linux(not certain as to the flavor, though), and I would suspect L.O.R.D. would do so with proper dos-emu settings as well. I believe haakon(on this forum) runs his BBs with Linux, and there may also be others. I know it is probably a lot of reading, but if you check the existing messages, you may find some of your answer. I believe L.O.R.D(Legend Of the Red Dragon) by Seth Able Robinson, is probably still downloadable from multiple Internet depositories. I used to run L.O.R.D & Usurper on my early BBS in the 90's. As far as I know, you would have run some kind od DOS emulation though for Usurper. LOD, I have never played or run.

lenny & Charles

Thanks for your response.

I believe haakon(on this forum) runs his BBs with Linux, and there may also be others. I know it is probably a lot of reading, but if you check the existing messages, you may find some of your answer.

I'll definitely look into it, getting this running has been my heart's desire for a very long time.

outsider wrote:Thanks for your response.

I believe haakon(on this forum) runs his BBs with Linux, and there may also be others. I know it is probably a lot of reading, but if you check the existing messages, you may find some of your answer.

I'll definitely look into it, getting this running has been my heart's desire for a very long time.

Hey sorry for the delay with this response, but if you still need help, here's what I can say:

I used to run Synchronet on linux, and many doors such as Usurper. I found in linux there were advantages and disadvantages, and later switched to Windows, which too had advantages and disadvantages.

Linux:

If you want to run Usurper under linux, and you don't have a BBS software in mind, I'd say go ahead and go with Synchronet. You should go to http://www.synchro.net I'm pretty sure and look in the source section and get the GNUmakefile for linux. You can run it and it should automatically download all the source files you need.

Of course before you do that, you need linux installed. My best luck has been running Linux Mandrake 9.2.

Once you get linux up and running and Synchronet is downloading properly and compiling, be sure to compile it by saying at least this:

gmake USE_DOSEMU=1

it's been a while, i'm not sure if you have to say gmake INSTALL or not... and if you have any trouble you might want to add a RELEASE=1 to it too. Do your best to get it compiling and if you get stuck stop by my bbs and post a message in the synchronet development message area (not email to me).

Anyway, once you have Synchronet compiling you'll want to download dosEMU. Download version 1.1.99.or something... do not get anything later than that like 1.2.something. Anything later than 1.1.99 version does not include virtual modem support and will not work. You must get that version. Don't get the development version just the straight up binaries or whatever (get the one that comes with FreeDOS to start). Get it, install it, and get it running and stuff. If you want, you can replace the FreeDOS with MS-DOS cause it probably will increase stability. All you really need to do is go to bootdisk.com I think and get a DOS 6.22 boot disk. Do that (from a windows machine of course), make a boot disk, then stick it in your linux machine. I forget the exact command but I think it's mcopy, which will let you copy all the files from somewhere including hidden / system files and it won't change anything. So, go to the free dos directory that is accessed when DosEMU "boots" and just say

mcopy [whatever] /dev/floppy/* .

where [whatever] is replaced with whatever switches and options you need to get it to do what you're trying to do...you gotta say something but I can't remember...if you do mcopy --help you should be able to find the one that you need to use... perhaps something that says something like copy all files hidden and system or something.

and I think /dev/floppy is where you'll find your floppy drive...right?

anyway, once you do that, say "dosemu" and it should start it up and if you did it right it should boot into MS-DOS instead of FreeDOS now.

If you have DosEMU working now, booting up right and all that, Synchronet downloaded and compiling using the USE_DOSEMU=1 tag, you should be good to go!

Now, you should maybe like a emusetup.bat or something like that in your CTRL directory, and then there was another batch file in my NODE directories. The one in the CTRL sets up basic stuff I don't think I had to mess with either too much, but you should somewhere see what drive letters DosEMU is assigning to what... ie, for me, D: was the current user's node directory, E: was the xtrn directory, and F and G were like the data and ctrl directories..something like that. If you don't see the batch file in the node dir, just put in some crap for a door and just run it so it'll make the file for the first time. keep this in mind for a minute.

Now, when you set up a door like Usurper you would then say the path to Usurper is like /sbbs/xtrn/usurper and the command would be usurper.bat %#, which will send the node number in place of %#. Then make a usurper.bat in your usurper dir (/sbbs/xtrn/usurper) and tell it to run

usurper.exe /N%1 /PD:if in fact D: is what your node directory is.

Then, for whatever games need all this stuff hardcoded, like LORD, just say node one's drop file is in "D:\" and the same for all the others. D: will always be the node dir for the user logged in.

That's about it. Good luck!!!!!!!!!!!!

outsider wrote:Sorry if this isn't a cool place to post.

I wanted to know if there was any other platforms supported by Usurper. I used to love the game, and want to set up one for my friends and I. I have access to things like FreeBSD and OSX. Is this only available in Windows or DOS? Are there any DOS emulators that anyone knows about? I don't have a bbs server program in mind yet, I was hoping when I found what some of my favorite games were supported under they would recommend one that would be supported by some unix platform.


Additionally, I'm looking for Legend of the Red Dragon, Land of Devastation. Any hints on how to get any of these things going on non-windows platforms would just make my day. (It was also my brother's birthday yesterday, he loved these.) Don't be shy if it seems hard to do, I will really appreciate it.



Also, hi and thanks for a great game.

Now, when you set up a door like Usurper you would then say the path to Usurper is like /sbbs/xtrn/usurper and the command would be usurper.bat %#, which will send the node number in place of %#. Then make a usurper.bat in your usurper dir (/sbbs/xtrn/usurper) and tell it to run

usurper.exe /N%1 /PD:if in fact D: is what your node directory is.

Then, for whatever games need all this stuff hardcoded, like LORD, just say node one's drop file is in "D:\" and the same for all the others. D: will always be the node dir for the user logged in.

That's about it. Good luck!!!!!!!!!!!!

allow me to beat a dead horse....

I ran usurper on linux for a time, and had a very active amount of players. For a time, I had over a dozen daily players pounding at this game. At one time, I had 9 players online. 9 copies of emulated dos running. I tweaked and hacked dosemu over two years, I even moved the BBS off-site to a 2+ghz machine, but viewed little improvement of speed, as more and more players came online.

I could tell how many players were playing by the speed at which the game played. Every user would cut a piece of the CPU pie. It was ridiculous. Maitnance became a 40 minute ordeal and a load of cronjobs and shell scripts. Your all welcome to use as example, http://theedge.net/~dingo/cvs/bbs/usurpers.sh and http://theedge.net/~dingo/cvs/bbs/maitnance.sh if you are interested in running usurpers on the linux platform. I ran many dos doors experimentaly to see what my users would like best, and they all liked usurpers and lord. More people played lord, but short-term. I had alot of active usurpers players for several years. I also hosted BRE and Tradewars to a handful of players.

I simply ended the usurpers game after a while. The more users playing the more complaints I would recieve about the slowdown of the game. Since then, I've become a much more proficient programmer and have left the GNU/Linux world to the BSD world, where BSD licenses are not restrictive, and documentation for programmers are beyond par.

There was a movement in my bbs at the time to completely re-write usurpers in a portable (and open) language, simply so that it would run faster, and we could fix the bugs ourselves, and complete all the dead-end holes (immortality, etc.) Work on this projected ended when my BBS did.

I, for one, would love to see usurpers open sourced, and I would personaly see to it that it is ported to a modern language such as C or Python, and also see to it that true multi-node technology implemented using shared memory, threading, and tcp/ip sockets. It is a fantastic game with _great_ potential. If it is not open sourced soon, I would not be suprised to see a complete re-write take its place in a few years.

btw, A friend of mine is a game developer in chicago, and attended a video game developer confrence several years ago, where the designer of 'fable' (xbox) shared his enthusiasm for a \"little known bbs game\" called \"usurpers\". He went on to explain some of the great features of usurpers, such as marriage, children, good and evil deeds. Some time later fable was released to much fan-fare. I'm curious, has the author recieved any letters of recognition from Peter Molyneux? Is this the usurpers re-write we had all been waiting for?

As I mentioned in another post, I'd much appreciate an open-sourcing. If not, perhaps pseudo-code of the main algorithms (for authenticity's sake)? (things like drinks, bar fighting, beer stealing etc.). I've recently started a project to create a both a faithful web-based clone of Usurper, and another web-based game based on the Usurper world.

I'd really like to see the code get open-sourced if the author isn't doing anything with it.

If the author wants to pick the project back up instead of going open-source, I'd really like to see a Win32 (DOOR32) build and a Linux build.

Err, I think the original poster was actually asking about BSD-based platforms like FreeBSD and Mac OS-X, rather than Linux. So in response to the original question:

FreeBSD has a DOS emulator (I forget what it's called, but you can find it in Ports, I think there's an emulators category). From what I know, it's not as good/thorough as Linux's DOSEMU. So emulating a DOS doorgame -- especially the old comm modem doorkits -- may prove difficult, unfortunately.

FreeBSD also has a Linux emulator, if you enable it in the kernel. So, *in theory*, you could use FreeBSD to emulate Linux to run DOSEMU to emulate DOS. (yikes!) If that even worked, it'd probably be a bit slow

Your best bet, for some BSD retro bbs action, is to contact Deuce. http://doors.bbsdev.net/ . He ported a bunch of open source doors to the BSDs, and also did the BSD ports of Synchronet bbs software. I know that these all run on FreeBSD, NetBSD, and OpenBSD. Not sure if he did Darwin / OSX ports yet though, but I think they're at least in progress. Anyway, with apple's impending shift to Intel chips, os/x ports will become a lot easier I'd guess.

Best of luck to you -- *nix is becoming a more viable bbs platform all the time. I've been wanting to port my two doors (http://www.doormud.com -- doormud, and tournament trivia) to FreeBSD and Linux for a few years, just haven't had the time. I'm thinking that an open-source port to Perl might be my easiest option for an open, cross-platform, quick-to-code solution.