cfcohen / abermud2 Goto Github PK

In a fit of nostalgia, some years ago I started trying to find source code to build a version of AberMUD2 close to the one I remember wasting far too much time on circa 1990. What I found was a later release of AberMUD2 (3.8.7) which had been reworked by Rich Salz, and an early AberMUD2 version, taken from the "X2 Support Group Game Development Archives" CD, which was at

  ftp://x2ftp.oulu.fi/pub/msdos/programming/gamesrc/abermud.zip

It's not completely clear which version this is, as the motd file lists it as 1.12, while distrib says 3.7.14, but all the files seem consistent with an early public release.

Although this is pretty much what I was after, the contents of the archive are in a pretty sorry state. It looks like it had been packed with an old MS-DOS archiver program, as all the filenames are truncated to 8.3, and all the directory information has been lost, causing some of the files in EXAMINES/ to be overwritten by those with the same name in TEXT/ROOMS/. Even worse, the code does not build. Comparing against Rich Salz's version, it looks as if long lines have somehow been deleted from several source files.

Armed with these two versions, I decided to see if I could get the earlier and more historically interesting one to run, using the later version as a guide for any missing pices. I ended up making the changes listed below to produce a working version of AberMUD2. No attempt has been made to clean up the code or correct the rather idiosyncratic spelling and grammar.

• Replaced the 10 or so missing files from EXAMINES/ and TEXT/ROOMS/ with those from Rich Salz's version.
• Compared code against Rich Salz's version and replaced missing long lines in source files.
• Included an implementation of BSD's flock() call in terms of fcntl().
• Replaced a call to getpw() with a call to getpwuid().
• Replaced calls to the unsafe gets() with fgets() in order to avoid warning messages from glibc.
• Changed calls to sgtty in key.c to use termios.
• Changed the world generator to zero memory before writing it to the game's world file.

The source has been tested under FreeBSD and Cygwin (a Unix-like environment for Windows) and should work under any other modern Unix or related system. If you have any problems (or successes, for that matter) let me know.

In order to build you'll need gcc, make and the crypt library. Virtually every Unix system should already have these. If you're using Cygwin, gcc and make are in the "Devel" category of the installer, and crypt is in "Libs". To build, open up a shell, go to the directory containing this file and enter

  cd mud
  sh install.sh
  sh install2.sh

If all goes well you should have built the "mud.1" and "mud.exe" executables, and a new world file in /usr/tmp/. Start up AberMUD:

  ./mud.1

log on as "debugger", set a password, and enter the game. Enter "reset" to make items and mobiles appear, and you're ready to play!