🚀 go-pugleaf

Telegram from Atlantis, (#2) dated Wed May 23 07:05:05 1984

I have the source for the empire game.  But before you get all unglued
let me explain what that means.  We were using a large software package
in day-to-day operations that was supplied in object form.  Our
supplier would not part with the source. Bribes, threats - nothing was
effective.  I decided to find out what it would take to "decompile"
an optimized object back to C.  Well the "impossible" isn't so bad.

In the time it took me to experiment with the idea, our needs w.r.t
the software package were satisfied.  Remembering that a friend of mine
in ihux-land had gotten a start on decompiling the empire game (and
being an incurable empire fanatic myself), I started in on the job of
decompiling empire.  The symbol tables, header files and thorough
knowledge of the game - along with a crude "decompiler" made it fairly
easy to recover the source.  Now - this source is something only a
decompiler could love !  But the C compiler is quite happy with it.
My friend and I hacked away at it off and on for about a year, and now
we have it running on a 5.0 VAX (and I think he has it running on a
5.0 3b20).  It's been running on the VAX for about 8 months.

This version is one that Peter sent out around 1978 for 3.0 ? 11/70s.
It has the orthogonal grid, no nukes, no food (agribusiness was a valid
sector type but not implemented).  It has everything you need for a good
WW2 scrap.

I sympathize with mr-frog and others that might have tried to patch
fly.o to fix the Aircraft Carrier Bug. It took me just as long to
patch the object as it did to decompile it and fix the source.  Fly.c
was the hardest command to decompile by far.  It even has an unreachable
code segment with an interesting printf which suggests the evolving
nature of Peter's code.

Yes, all you empire fanatics, the source exists outside of PSL's hands,
but perhaps not the version you love.  If you read this Peter, and wonder
how anyone could be so crazy - remember what you wrote in that manual
page: "Although no goal is explicitly stated, players rapidly derive
their own."  How about recovering the source as a goal ?!

For the interested, I have a list of the bugs fixed, and the bugs
remaining.

	drutx!tsf

[20:254] Command : bye