The Ur-Quan Masters Discussion Forum

Since the original Star Control 2 ran on DOS, it would be nice to have UQM running on DOS as well. I hope it would be possible to actually port UQM to DOS; two things that could prevent this are lack of threads on DOS (which could probably be worked around somehow) and lack of DOS port of SDL (but Allegro could likely be used instead, maybe even on other systems). Alternatively, perhaps it could be possible to remove references to the Star Control name from the original DOS game and release it like that (this should be relatively easy to do).

Isnt that sort of like digitilising a vinyl record to put onto another vinyl record?

Re: removing the trademarked portions of Star Control II: copyright doesn't work that way.  The DOS version of the game is, at least in the U.S., protected by copyright for the next 60 years, give or take.  Altering it and redistributing it is expressly illegal.  That's pretty much the point of UQM; to have a seperate work unencumbered by the original copyright.

As for a DOS version: is there a terribly compelling reason to do it other than the "gee whiz" factor?  If you're wanting a "slim" version without all the overhead of a windowing system, look here (http://www.submedia.net/uqm/), at the self-contained ISO image.  It uses a custom-made micro-Linux distribution with SVGAlib to manage things, and runs pretty well on some rather slow hardware.  And since it can be run without needing to install anything, I'd think that the niche for a DOS version has been filled already, albeit by other means.

As for porting from SDL to Allegro and back again, that is not an exercise in triviality; just ask the Timewarp guys.  And the only possible solutions for the lack of native threads are a) writing a pseudo-threading library for DOS that can "fake it" acceptably well, or b) altering the UQM code to run everything in a single thread.  Both are much easier said than done.

But otherwise, if you truly think it's a worthy goal, then by all means go ahead.  The sources are freely available for download, and patches can be submitted via Bugzilla.

Actually, it might work. AFAIK TFB always had the copyright on the game, they just exclusively licensed the game to Accolade (and had to license it back to make the 3DO version, but that's another story). Now the exclusive license ended when Accolade stopped paying royalties. Depending on the terms of the license they may have the right to just republish the game. It's just the trade mark that is in the hands of Accolade (now Atari).

Perhaps, but there is a world of difference, legally speaking, between "the original copyright holders altering and redistributing their own work" and "some random yahoo on the Internet altering and redistributing the works of others".  You are suggesting the former, the original poster was suggesting the latter.

Um, why not just get a copy of the original SC2 for DOS?

Because, uh, um... stuff!

I was actually thinking of asking TFB to either do it themselves or give permission to someone else to do it, but didn't mention it because I was (and still am) more interested in porting the source code. However, since that seems to be highly nontrivial, I suppose it wouldn't hurt to ask TFB about modifying the original game. So how do I contact them? Their website is password protected, which makes it kind of hard to find any contact information there.

Because copies are not that easily obtained. Those that are sold on eBay tend to be more expensive than I'm willing to pay for, and I don't know where else I could get one.

I have a copy.  ::)