1TRADER(6)                        Games Manual                        TRADER(6)
2
3
4

NAME

6       trader - a game of interstellar trading
7

SYNOPSIS

9       trader [--no-color|--no-colour] [--max-turn=NUM] [GAME]
10       trader [-h|--help] [-V|--version]
11

DESCRIPTION

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

OPTIONS

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
22       --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
27       --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
32       -h, --help
33              Show a summary of command-line options and exit.
34
35       -V, --version
36              Display version information about the program, then exit.
37

EXIT STATUS

39       0      Star Traders finished without any errors.
40
41       1      Star  Traders  encountered  an unrecoverable problem or error; a
42              diagnostic message will be written to  standard  error  in  this
43              case.
44

EXAMPLES

46       You  can  start  a new game by running Star Traders without any command
47       line options:
48
49              trader
50
51       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
58       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
62              trader 4
63
64       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
67              xterm -g 80x24 -fa Mono -fs 18 -bg black -fg white -bc +sb +fbx
68              -e trader &
69
70       If you would like a full “retro-computing” green-screen experience, try
71       (again, typed all on one line):
72
73              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
77       Or, if you prefer the old amber screens of yesteryear:
78
79              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
83

ENVIRONMENT

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
93       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

FILES

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

BUGS

110       None yet known...
111

FEEDBACK

113       Your comments, suggestions, corrections  and  enhancements  are  always
114       warmly welcomed!  Please send these to:
115
116       Postal:   John Zaitseff,
117                 The ZAP Group,
118                 Unit 6, 116 Woodburn Road,
119                 Berala, NSW, 2141,
120                 Australia
121
122       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
127https://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
133       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
138       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
143       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
147       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

HISTORY

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
158       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
164       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
169       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
176       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
182       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
188       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

SEE ALSO

196       Star Traders home page ⟨https://www.zap.org.au/projects/trader/
197
198
199
200Unix-like systems              9th January, 2020                     TRADER(6)
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