Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!rpi!bu.edu!m2c!viewlog.viewlogic.com!peter
From: peter@suntan.viewlogic.com (Peter Colby)
Newsgroups: comp.sources.games.bugs
Subject: Re: xconq, xconq, who's got the xconq?
Message-ID: <1991Jun9.184109.19872@viewlogic.com>
Date: 9 Jun 91 18:41:09 GMT
References: <16466@reed.UUCP> <44@dworkin.UUCP>
Sender: news@viewlogic.com
Organization: Viewlogic Systems, Inc., Marlboro, MA
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Originator: peter@hari
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In article <44@dworkin.UUCP>, shevett@dworkin.UUCP ( Sysop) writes:
|> ameiba@reed.UUCP (Keith Steiger) writes:
|> 
|> >I've gotten xconq from every site that seems reasonable, and I've gotten four
|> >major distributions--the 5.0 version from comp.sources.games, 5.3, and two
|> >different versions of 5.4.  
|> 
|> 
|> AAAAAAARRRGGGGG!!  Boy have *I* fallen behind.  I'm running Conquer
|> 4.9 on my SCO Xenix 2.3.1 system.  I've cut the productivity of a large
|> portion of the population in my area, and I'd like to enhance it. (Go
|> after that other half ;-).
|> 
	Sorry, but xconq and conquer are two totally different games! 
	Conquer is a multi-player curses based game that (as far as I know)
only exists on UNIX workstations - originally posted in c.s.g of course. The
last version I played was 4.6 or so, released about 1 1/2 years ago.
	Xconq on the other hand has a long derivative history. Starting out
with a game called "empire" that was written (in Fortran no less) on a
Decsystem 10. It migrated to DecSystem 20 and to Vax/VMS, oh about 7 or 8
years ago. The same basic game (by the original author?) was released on
Apple Macintosh as Strategic Conquest - right about the time that the Mac+ came
out. This version has been revved twice with Strategic Conquest 3.0 released
about 6 months ago by a different publisher than the 1.0 and 2.0 versions.
Xconq is an expanded version developed entirely independantly (without
reference to the original code) for the X-window system by a person called
Stan Shebs - originally at the University of Utah (or somewhere nearby) and
now at Apple Computer. The first version I heard about came out for X10 and
was something less 5.0 which was released sometime around the same period
as X11R2. Version 5.1 (the last "official" version by Stan Shebs) was
released sometime around the X11R3 timeframe - 6 months to a year prior to
Conquer 4.6. No version of xconq beyond 5.1 has ever been released to the
net, rather news of ftp sites with later "home grown" versions have travelled
about by word of mouth (or email or comp.sources.games.bugs).
	I'm sure Stan Sheps, who apparently reads this newsgroup occaisionally,
can give a much more accurate history of xconq than I can.
	Peter C

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