Merchant Prince Trader Program

[inexorabletash]

Originally posted by Aramis:
One other comment: I can't mount prodos disks to mac on my current machines; this was stripped by listing chunks at a time, then capturing the text, using an emulator. [/QB]

Oh, dude, the pain, the pain! There are tools for this - Google on CiderPress. It'll crack open a DSK image and you can copy/paste the source to an Applesoft BASIC file into your clipboard. Okay, this is on Windows, but all you need to do is ask!

Also, if anyone is thinking of taking this Merchant Prince/Trader business on:

Consider doing it as a web page using JavaScript. Yes, that's right, the language that up until a few months ago got almost less respect from seasoned developers than VB. But think about it - JavaScript has lots of nice features (objects, regular expressions, closures), and a reasonably decent syntax. Sure, it's not strongly typed, but that's the breaks.

On the plus side, the end result (a web app) would run in practically any browser on any OS, making updates is easy, and users can download the page and run it locally if they don't have a network connection.

To handle end-user supplied data you just have a big text field and let the user copy/paste .SEC data into it. Similar tricks like that and you'll have a very lightweight, very portable, very maintainable implementation that makes almost everyone happy.

(And then if you want to get fancy, you could mash it up with my map site. I can spin up a web service so you can query a world's data, and you can actually already re-use the mapping display in your own site if you want (with some work).)

 

[Cymew]

The big problem with Javascript is that there are not two browsers on this earth that interprete the source the same way.

 

[Merxiless]

Plus, from my end, I can barely do C++, let alone Java.

I'm not a web developer, just a guy that did a year of Applied Business Programming in 1984 at a Tech School, before joining the Navy, and picking up bits of languages here and there, like Amiga Basic, some C++, and have programmed a Neverwinter Nights Server from Scratch, for the last three years.

However, if someone wishes to port it, woot.

My concept here is to add a lot more functionality to this program, that we see in the 200 or so lines above, mostly for the community to have a resource for Solo / Refereed Traveller, but also since this application has been rattling around in my subconscious, since I first saw and worked with Galactic, many years ago.

 

[sid6.7]

Originally posted by Merxiless:
Berg, I am using Quick Basic 4.5 (with the compiler, not the Qbasic that came with win95)

This is because I am both more familiar with it, and it's what Galactic 2.4 was written in, by Jim Vassilakos.

This is an old page of his:
http://www.cs.ucr.edu/~jimv/progs.html

The Elektra page has been down for some months.

i agreed with jimV to hold his stuff here
including galactic 2.4:

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Gal24/

he was running outa bandwidth..

 

[aramis]

Originally posted by Cymew:
The big problem with Javascript is that there are not two browsers on this earth that interprete the source the same way.

Funny, but all the Javascript I've written runs identically on iCab, Safari, and IE (Mac AND Win).

You just need to avoid certain coding issues, and code for older versions of Javascript/ECMA script.

If you try to use the "Latest Greatest MS-JavaScript", you WILL have compatibility issues... loads of them. Mostly because MS ignores the w3c standards.

 

[inexorabletash]

Weird - that Trader source is apparently quite different than the disk from GDW. You can snag the "Shrinkit" (SDK) version of the disk here:

http://www.apple2.org.za/mirrors/ground.icaen.uiowa.edu/apple8/Games/FarFuture/

To turn an SDK into a DSK (actually, a DO) on Windows, use CiderPress (or email me).

The version there (TRADER.SDK) dates to November 2nd, 1995. There are a ton of files - a general datafile editor, a sector generator, tradeworld identifier, SR and SM data, ship data, and TRADER itself. The Applesoft source is 302 lines long.

 

[aramis]

Joshua:

I'll happily host the files (both the older 1979 and the 1995), if you'll pop them out and put them into a zip. I'll even see if I can find the time to test them on Chipmunk Basic. I can't find a CiderPress equivalent for Mac OSX, and really don't have the time.