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 op‐
30 tion 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 en‐
54 tering the names of the players, you will have the opportunity to read
55 instructions on how to play the game. Do so—and good luck in the game!
56 If you would like to continue a previously-saved game, simply specify
58 that game number on the command line. For example, the following
59 starts game 4, if it was previously saved:
60 trader 4
62 If you are running under the X Window System, you might like to start
64 the game in a dedicated xterm(1) window (typed all on one line):
65 xterm -g 80x24 -fa Mono -fs 18 -bg black -fg white -bc +sb +fbx
67 -e trader &
68 If you would like a full “retro-computing” green-screen experience, try
70 (again, typed all on one line):
71 xterm -g 80x24 -fa Mono -fs 18 -bg '#181818' -fg '#2CAB00' -bc
73 +sb +bdc +fbx -xrm 'XTerm*colorBD: #41FF00' -e trader
74 --no-colour &
75 Or, if you prefer the old amber screens of yesteryear:
77 xterm -g 80x24 -fa Mono -fs 18 -bg '#101010' -fg '#AB7A00' -bc
79 +sb +bdc +fbx -xrm 'XTerm*colorBD: #FFB700' -e trader
80 --no-colour &
81
84 XDG_DATA_HOME, HOME
85 If XDG_DATA_HOME is set to an absolute pathname (that is, a path
86 that starts with “/”), Star Traders will use that directory,
87 with a subdirectory trader, to store game files. If this envi‐
88 ronment variable is not set or does not start with “/”,
89 ~/.local/share/trader will be used instead, where “~” represents
90 your home directory, as contained in the HOME environment vari‐
91 able.
92 LINES, COLUMNS
94 Star Traders uses the Curses library for displaying text on the
95 screen. As such, it will access these two environment variables
96 if the underlying Curses library does so (see, for example, the
97 ENVIRONMENT section in the ncurses(3) manual page for in-depth
98 details). It requires a text console or window of at least
99 80×24 in size.
100 LANG, LC_ALL, etc.
102 This version of Star Traders has full support for locales and
103 will use appropriate settings. In particular, messages will be
104 displayed using LC_MESSAGES and LANGUAGE (if Star Traders has
105 been translated into that language). In addition, numeric quan‐
106 tities will be displayed using LC_NUMERIC and monetary quanti‐
107 ties will use LC_MONETARY. See the locale(7) or setlocale(3)
108 manual pages for more details on locale settings.
109 TEXTDOMAINDIR
111 If set, Star Traders will use this path as the base with which
112 to locate its message catalogs instead of the compiled-in path;
113 the relevant trader.mo files should be located in language-code
114 subdirectories (such as en_AU), in LC_MESSAGES sub-subdirecto‐
115 ries.
116
118 ~/.local/share/trader/gameN
119 Star Traders stores saved game files in the .local/share/trader
120 subdirectory in your home directory (unless overridden by the
121 XDG_DATA_HOME environment variable). N is a number between 1
122 and 9 inclusive. The game file is scrambled to prevent you or
123 others from casually cheating!
124 ~/.trader/gameN
126 If the ~/.trader directory exists, game files will be read from
127 and saved to this location instead. This is for compatibility
128 with versions of Star Traders prior to version 7.15.
129
131 None yet known...
132
134 Your comments, suggestions, corrections and enhancements are always
135 warmly welcomed! Please send these to:
136 Postal: John Zaitseff,
138 The ZAP Group Australia,
139 Unit 6, 116 Woodburn Road,
140 Berala, NSW, 2141,
141 Australia
142 Email: J.Zaitseff@zap.org.au
144 Web: ⟨https://www.zap.org.au/projects/trader/⟩
145 FTP: ⟨https://ftp.zap.org.au/pub/trader/⟩
146 ⟨ftp://ftp.zap.org.au/pub/trader/⟩
147 Git: ⟨https://www.zap.org.au/git-browser/trader.git⟩
148 ⟨https://git.zap.org.au/git/trader.git⟩
149 ⟨git://git.zap.org.au/data/git/trader.git⟩
150
152 Copyright © 1990-2022, John Zaitseff.
153 Star Traders is free software that is distributed under the terms of
155 the GNU General Public License. You can redistribute it and/or modify
156 it under the terms of that License as published by the Free Software
157 Foundation, either version 3 or (at your option) any later version.
158 This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but
160 WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MER‐
161 CHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU General
162 Public License for more details.
163 You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License along
165 with this program. If not, see the GNU licenses web page ⟨https://
166 www.gnu.org/licenses/⟩.
167 Even though the GNU General Public License does not require you to send
169 your modifications back to the author, it is considered “good form” to
170 do so, as this allows your modifications to be incorporated into future
171 versions of the program, allowing others to benefit from them.
172
174 The original (and very primitive) Star Traders game was written by
175 S. J. Singer in 1984 using Altair Basic. This was modified for Micro‐
176 soft Basic (MBASIC) running under the CP/M-80 operating system by John
177 Zaitseff and released on 7th March, 1988.
178 Star Traders was then completely rewritten in 1990 for the Australian-
180 designed 8-bit MicroBee computer running CP/M-80 on a Zilog Z80 proces‐
181 sor, using Turbo Pascal 3.01a. Essentially, only the name of the game
182 and some of the ideas were retained in this version. Version 4.1 of
183 Star Traders was released on 1st August, 1991.
184 In 1992, it was recompiled for the NEC Advanced Personal Computer (with
186 8-inch floppy drives!) running CP/M-86 on an 8086 processor, using
187 Turbo Pascal 2.0. This version had colour added to it in the form of
188 ANSI escape sequences; version 4.4 was released on 2nd August, 1993.
189 The next version came in 1993, when the program was recompiled to run
191 on IBM-compatible machines running MS-DOS and ANSI.SYS. Turbo Pascal
192 6.0 was used for this. The ANSI escape sequences were slightly differ‐
193 ent under MS-DOS than under the NEC, in that the NEC supported a number
194 of extra character attributes. In other words, the MS-DOS version
195 looked worse than the one running under CP/M-86!
196 Star Traders was recompiled again in 1994 for IBM-compatible machines
198 with VGA/EGA/CGA video graphics adapters. The output routines were
199 recoded to use a “windowed” look. Borland Pascal 7.0 was used for this
200 purpose, along with a number of text window manipulation modules. Ver‐
201 sion 5.4 was released on 1st June, 1994.
202 In 1995, Star Traders was completely rewritten for the 16-bit Microsoft
204 Windows 3.1 graphical environment. Microsoft Visual Basic 3.0 was used
205 for this purpose. Although completely rewritten, the original algo‐
206 rithms were reused from previous versions. Version 6.0 of the game was
207 released on 15th September, 1995.
208 Star Traders was then to languish until almost 16 years later... when
210 the game was rewritten once again, this time in the C programming lan‐
211 guage. Version 7.0 was released on 25th July, 2011 for Unix-like oper‐
212 ating systems such as Linux, with subsequent releases to add features
213 and correct bugs. Now you, too, can run this small piece of computing
214 history!
215
217 Star Traders home page ⟨https://www.zap.org.au/projects/trader/⟩
218Unix-like systems 3rd August, 2022 TRADER(6)