1TRADER(6) Games Manual TRADER(6)
2
6 trader - a game of interstellar trading
7
9 trader [--no-color|--no-colour] [--max-turn=NUM] [GAME]
10 trader [-h|--help] [-V|--version]
11
13 Star Traders is a simple game of interstellar trading, where the objec‐
14 tive is to create companies, buy and sell shares, borrow and repay
15 money, in order to become the wealthiest player (the winner).
16
18 GAME If GAME is specified as a number between 1 and 9 (inclusive),
19 load and continue playing that game. If GAME is not specified,
20 start a new game.
21 --no-color, --no-colour
23 Don't use colour for displaying the text in the game. Use this
24 option for a “retro-computing” look (as shown in the EXAMPLES
25 below).
26 --max-turn=NUM
28 Set the number of turns in the game to NUM. In this version of
29 Star Traders, NUM must be greater or equal to 10. If this
30 option is not specified, the default is 50 turns.
31 -h, --help
33 Show a summary of command-line options and exit.
34 -V, --version
36 Display version information about the program, then exit.
37
39 0 Star Traders finished without any errors.
40 1 Star Traders encountered an unrecoverable problem or error; a
42 diagnostic message will be written to standard error in this
43 case.
44
46 You can start a new game by running Star Traders without any command
47 line options:
48 trader
50 Once the game starts, you will be asked to enter the number of people
52 playing. From one to eight people can play (although, in this version,
53 they will all have to share the one keyboard and screen!). After
54 entering the names of the players, you will have the opportunity to
55 read instructions on how to play the game. Do so—and good luck in the
56 game!
57 If you would like to continue a previously-saved game, simply specify
59 that game number on the command line. For example, the following
60 starts game 4, if it was previously saved:
61 trader 4
63 If you are running under the X Window System, you might like to start
65 the game in a dedicated xterm(1) window (typed all on one line):
66 xterm -g 80x24 -fa Mono -fs 18 -bg black -fg white -bc +sb +fbx
68 -e trader &
69 If you would like a full “retro-computing” green-screen experience, try
71 (again, typed all on one line):
72 xterm -g 80x24 -fa Mono -fs 18 -bg '#181818' -fg '#2CAB00' -bc
74 +sb +bdc +fbx -xrm 'XTerm*colorBD: #41FF00' -e trader
75 --no-colour &
76 Or, if you prefer the old amber screens of yesteryear:
78 xterm -g 80x24 -fa Mono -fs 18 -bg '#101010' -fg '#AB7A00' -bc
80 +sb +bdc +fbx -xrm 'XTerm*colorBD: #FFB700' -e trader
81 --no-colour &
82
85 LINES, COLUMNS
86 Star Traders uses the Curses library for displaying text on the
87 screen. As such, it will access these two environment variables
88 if the underlying Curses library does so (see, for example, the
89 ENVIRONMENT section in the ncurses(3) manual page for in-depth
90 details). It requires a text console or window of at least
91 80×24 in size.
92 LANG, LC_ALL, etc.
94 This version of Star Traders has full support for locales and
95 will use appropriate settings. In particular, messages will be
96 displayed using LC_MESSAGES and LANGUAGE (if Star Traders has
97 been translated into that language). In addition, numeric quan‐
98 tities will be displayed using LC_NUMERIC and monetary quanti‐
99 ties will use LC_MONETARY. See the locale(7) or setlocale(3)
100 manual pages for more details on locale settings.
101
103 ~/.trader/gameN
104 Star Traders stores saved game files in the .trader subdirectory
105 in your home directory. N is a number between 1 and 9 inclu‐
106 sive. The game file is scrambled to prevent you or others from
107 casually cheating!
108
110 None yet known...
111
113 Your comments, suggestions, corrections and enhancements are always
114 warmly welcomed! Please send these to:
115 Postal: John Zaitseff,
117 The ZAP Group,
118 Unit 6, 116 Woodburn Road,
119 Berala, NSW, 2141,
120 Australia
121 Email: J.Zaitseff@zap.org.au
123 Web: ⟨https://www.zap.org.au/projects/trader/⟩
124 FTP: ⟨https://ftp.zap.org.au/pub/trader/⟩
125 ⟨ftp://ftp.zap.org.au/pub/trader/⟩
126 Git: ⟨https://www.zap.org.au/git-browser/trader.git⟩
127 ⟨https://git.zap.org.au/git/trader.git⟩
128 ⟨git://git.zap.org.au/data/git/trader.git⟩
129
131 Copyright © 1990-2020, John Zaitseff.
132 Star Traders is free software that is distributed under the terms of
134 the GNU General Public License. You can redistribute it and/or modify
135 it under the terms of that License as published by the Free Software
136 Foundation, either version 3 or (at your option) any later version.
137 This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but
139 WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MER‐
140 CHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU General
141 Public License for more details.
142 You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License along
144 with this program. If not, see the GNU licenses web page ⟨https://
145 www.gnu.org/licenses/⟩.
146 Even though the GNU General Public License does not require you to send
148 your modifications back to the author, it is considered “good form” to
149 do so, as this allows your modifications to be incorporated into future
150 versions of the program, allowing others to benefit from them.
151
153 The original (and very primitive) Star Traders game was written by
154 S. J. Singer in 1984 using Altair Basic. This was modified for Micro‐
155 soft Basic (MBASIC) running under the CP/M-80 operating system by John
156 Zaitseff and released on 7th March, 1988.
157 Star Traders was then completely rewritten in 1990 for the Australian-
159 designed 8-bit MicroBee computer running CP/M-80 on a Zilog Z80 proces‐
160 sor, using Turbo Pascal 3.01a. Essentially, only the name of the game
161 and some of the ideas were retained in this version. Version 4.1 of
162 Star Traders was released on 1st August, 1991.
163 In 1992, it was recompiled for the NEC Advanced Personal Computer (with
165 8-inch floppy drives!) running CP/M-86 on an 8086 processor, using
166 Turbo Pascal 2.0. This version had colour added to it in the form of
167 ANSI escape sequences; version 4.4 was released on 2nd August, 1993.
168 The next version came in 1993, when the program was recompiled to run
170 on IBM-compatible machines running MS-DOS and ANSI.SYS. Turbo Pascal
171 6.0 was used for this. The ANSI escape sequences were slightly differ‐
172 ent under MS-DOS than under the NEC, in that the NEC supported a number
173 of extra character attributes. In other words, the MS-DOS version
174 looked worse than the one running under CP/M-86!
175 Star Traders was recompiled again in 1994 for IBM-compatible machines
177 with VGA/EGA/CGA video graphics adapters. The output routines were
178 recoded to use a “windowed” look. Borland Pascal 7.0 was used for this
179 purpose, along with a number of text window manipulation modules. Ver‐
180 sion 5.4 was released on 1st June, 1994.
181 In 1995, Star Traders was completely rewritten for the 16-bit Microsoft
183 Windows 3.1 graphical environment. Microsoft Visual Basic 3.0 was used
184 for this purpose. Although completely rewritten, the original algo‐
185 rithms were reused from previous versions. Version 6.0 of the game was
186 released on 15th September, 1995.
187 Star Traders was then to languish until almost 16 years later... when
189 the game was rewritten once again, this time in the C programming lan‐
190 guage. Version 7.0 was released on 25th July, 2011 for Unix-like oper‐
191 ating systems such as Linux, with subsequent releases to add features
192 and correct bugs. Now you, too, can run this small piece of computing
193 history!
194
196 Star Traders home page ⟨https://www.zap.org.au/projects/trader/⟩
197Unix-like systems 9th January, 2020 TRADER(6)