Ubuntu Manpage: trader - a game of interstellar trading

NAME

       trader - a game of interstellar trading

SYNOPSIS

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

DESCRIPTION

       Star  Traders  is  a simple game of interstellar trading, where the objective is to create
       companies, buy and sell shares, borrow and repay money, in order to become the  wealthiest
       player (the winner).

OPTIONS

       GAME   If  GAME  is  specified  as a number between 1 and 9 (inclusive), load and continue
              playing that game.  If GAME is not specified, start a new game.

       --no-color, --no-colour
              Don't use colour for displaying the text in  the  game.   Use  this  option  for  a
              “retro-computing” look (as shown in the EXAMPLES below).

       --max-turn=NUM
              Set  the  number of turns in the game to NUM.  In this version of Star Traders, NUM
              must be greater or equal to 10.  If this option is not specified, the default is 50
              turns.

       -h, --help
              Show a summary of command-line options and exit.

       -V, --version
              Display version information about the program, then exit.

EXIT STATUS

       0      Star Traders finished without any errors.

       1      Star  Traders  encountered  an unrecoverable problem or error; a diagnostic message
              will be written to standard error in this case.

EXAMPLES

       You can start a new game by running Star Traders without any command line options:

              trader

       Once the game starts, you will be asked to enter the number of people playing.   From  one
       to  eight  people can play (although, in this version, they will all have to share the one
       keyboard and screen!).  After entering the  names  of  the  players,  you  will  have  the
       opportunity  to  read  instructions  on  how to play the game.  Do so—and good luck in the
       game!

       If you would like to continue a previously-saved game, simply specify that game number  on
       the command line.  For example, the following starts game 4, if it was previously saved:

              trader 4

       If  you  are  running  under  the  X  Window System, you might like to start the game in a
       dedicated xterm(1) window (typed all on one line):

              xterm -g 80x24 -fa Mono -fs 18 -bg black -fg white -bc +sb +fbx -e trader &

       If you would like a full “retro-computing” green-screen experience, try (again, typed  all
       on one line):

              xterm -g 80x24 -fa Mono -fs 18 -bg '#181818' -fg '#2CAB00' -bc +sb +bdc +fbx -xrm
              'XTerm*colorBD: #41FF00' -e trader --no-colour &

       Or, if you prefer the old amber screens of yesteryear:

              xterm -g 80x24 -fa Mono -fs 18 -bg '#101010' -fg '#AB7A00' -bc +sb +bdc +fbx -xrm
              'XTerm*colorBD: #FFB700' -e trader --no-colour &

ENVIRONMENT

XDG_DATA_HOME, HOME
If XDG_DATA_HOME is set to an absolute pathname (that is, a path that starts with
“/”), Star Traders will use that directory, with a subdirectory trader, to store
game files. If this environment variable is not set or does not start with “/”,
~/.local/share/trader will be used instead, where “~” represents your home
directory, as contained in the HOME environment variable.

LINES, COLUMNS
Star Traders uses the Curses library for displaying text on the screen. As such,
it will access these two environment variables if the underlying Curses library
does so (see, for example, the ENVIRONMENT section in the ncurses(3) manual page
for in-depth details). It requires a text console or window of at least 80×24 in
size.

LANG, LC_ALL, etc.
This version of Star Traders has full support for locales and will use appropriate
settings. In particular, messages will be displayed using LC_MESSAGES and LANGUAGE
(if Star Traders has been translated into that language). In addition, numeric
quantities will be displayed using LC_NUMERIC and monetary quantities will use
LC_MONETARY. See the locale(7) or setlocale(3) manual pages for more details on
locale settings.

TEXTDOMAINDIR
If set, Star Traders will use this path as the base with which to locate its
message catalogs instead of the compiled-in path; the relevant trader.mo files
should be located in language-code subdirectories (such as en_AU), in LC_MESSAGES
sub-subdirectories.

FILES

       ~/.local/share/trader/gameN
              Star  Traders  stores  saved  game files in the .local/share/trader subdirectory in
              your home directory (unless overridden by the XDG_DATA_HOME environment  variable).
              N is a number between 1 and 9 inclusive.  The game file is scrambled to prevent you
              or others from casually cheating!

       ~/.trader/gameN
              If the ~/.trader directory exists, game files will be read from and saved  to  this
              location instead.  This is for compatibility with versions of Star Traders prior to
              version 7.15.

BUGS

       None yet known...

FEEDBACK

       Your comments, suggestions, corrections  and  enhancements  are  always  warmly  welcomed!
       Please send these to:

       Postal:   John Zaitseff,
                 The ZAP Group Australia,
                 Unit 6, 116 Woodburn Road,
                 Berala, NSW, 2141,
                 Australia

       Email:    J.Zaitseff@zap.org.au
       Web:      ⟨https://www.zap.org.au/projects/trader/⟩
       FTP:      ⟨https://ftp.zap.org.au/pub/trader/⟩
                 ⟨ftp://ftp.zap.org.au/pub/trader/⟩
       Git:      ⟨https://www.zap.org.au/git-browser/trader.git⟩
                 ⟨https://git.zap.org.au/git/trader.git⟩
                 ⟨git://git.zap.org.au/data/git/trader.git⟩

COPYRIGHT

       Copyright © 1990-2022, John Zaitseff.

       Star  Traders  is  free  software  that  is distributed under the terms of the GNU General
       Public License.  You can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of that  License
       as  published  by  the  Free Software Foundation, either version 3 or (at your option) any
       later version.

       This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY  WARRANTY;
       without  even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE.
       See the GNU General Public License for more details.

       You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License along with this program.
       If not, see the GNU licenses web page ⟨https://www.gnu.org/licenses/⟩.

       Even though the GNU General Public License does not require you to send your modifications
       back to the author,  it  is  considered  “good  form”  to  do  so,  as  this  allows  your
       modifications  to  be incorporated into future versions of the program, allowing others to
       benefit from them.

HISTORY

The original (and very primitive) Star Traders game was written by S. J. Singer in 1984
using Altair Basic. This was modified for Microsoft Basic (MBASIC) running under the
CP/M-80 operating system by John Zaitseff and released on 7th March, 1988.

Star Traders was then completely rewritten in 1990 for the Australian-designed 8-bit
MicroBee computer running CP/M-80 on a Zilog Z80 processor, using Turbo Pascal 3.01a.
Essentially, only the name of the game and some of the ideas were retained in this
version. Version 4.1 of Star Traders was released on 1st August, 1991.

In 1992, it was recompiled for the NEC Advanced Personal Computer (with 8-inch floppy
drives!) running CP/M-86 on an 8086 processor, using Turbo Pascal 2.0. This version had
colour added to it in the form of ANSI escape sequences; version 4.4 was released on 2nd
August, 1993.

The next version came in 1993, when the program was recompiled to run on IBM-compatible
machines running MS-DOS and ANSI.SYS. Turbo Pascal 6.0 was used for this. The ANSI
escape sequences were slightly different under MS-DOS than under the NEC, in that the NEC
supported a number of extra character attributes. In other words, the MS-DOS version
looked worse than the one running under CP/M-86!

Star Traders was recompiled again in 1994 for IBM-compatible machines with VGA/EGA/CGA
video graphics adapters. The output routines were recoded to use a “windowed” look.
Borland Pascal 7.0 was used for this purpose, along with a number of text window
manipulation modules. Version 5.4 was released on 1st June, 1994.

In 1995, Star Traders was completely rewritten for the 16-bit Microsoft Windows 3.1
graphical environment. Microsoft Visual Basic 3.0 was used for this purpose. Although
completely rewritten, the original algorithms were reused from previous versions. Version
6.0 of the game was released on 15th September, 1995.

Star Traders was then to languish until almost 16 years later... when the game was
rewritten once again, this time in the C programming language. Version 7.0 was released
on 25th July, 2011 for Unix-like operating systems such as Linux, with subsequent releases
to add features and correct bugs. Now you, too, can run this small piece of computing
history!