Near the end of the last century, when the Internet was young, BBS were everywhere, and Atari STs were hot, two developers (Paul Witte and Herb Flower) built a game called Thieves’ Guild. Thieves’ Guild was (is?) a multiplayer strategy game for BBS systems. Players could (can?) explorer a large medieval world with spell casting, combat, and thievery. With 25 different towns to explore there is lot of game there to play. BBS door games are asynchronous with players give X amount of turns to play per day.
Originally it was built on the Atari ST and written in Pascal using OSS’s Personal Pascal compiler but later ported to Turbo Pascal (developed by Anders Hejlsberg while at Borland). Turbo Pascal 5.5 can be downloaded from Embarcadero’s CodeCentral. Other notable software built in early Pascal include version 1.0 of Adobe Photoshop.
There is an interview with Paul Witte and Herb Flower over on the Break Into Chat site.
Extensive write up by Josh Renaud on Thieves’ Guild.
Example source code from the Atari ST version:
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(******MAKE UPPER CASE*****************************************************) Procedure UPCASE(var LITTLE:Str255); Var COUNT,COUNTLA:Integer; Begin COUNTLA:=ord(LITTLE[0]); If COUNTLA>80 then COUNTLA:=80; For COUNT:=1 to COUNTLA do If (ord(LITTLE[COUNT]) > 96) and (ord(LITTLE[COUNT]) < 123) then LITTLE[COUNT]:=chr(ord(LITTLE[COUNT])-32) END; |
Slashdot has a discussion about Thieves’ Guild.
Example source code from the Turbo Pascal version:
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Procedure ENCRYPT(Var INFORM:FIXEDONE;DO2:Boolean); Var KEY:String[80]; COUNT,COUNT1,COUNT3:Integer; Begin KEY:='Gytwdy6666357t672^%$^&T#HujBDY%7uG@YGX&D^&*STYGHUH@IHDLS(*@++FIOS|'; COUNT1:=Ord(KEY[0]); COUNT:=0;COUNT3:=0; Repeat COUNT3:=COUNT3+1; COUNT:=COUNT+1; INFORM[COUNT]:=Chr(ENCNUM(ord(KEY[COUNT3]),ord(INFORM[COUNT]),DO2)); If COUNT3=COUNT1 then COUNT3:=0 Until COUNT=Ord(INFORM[0]); End; |
Thieves’ Guild endgame play-through by Josh Renaud:
Apparently there is still a BBS called Dark Force BBS running the game and you can log in and play.
Who’s going to port this game from Turbo Pascal to Delphi 10.4.1? Would be interesting to hear how of the much code will work straight across without any changes. Having long lasting code from years and years ago that still runs and compiles is one of the strengths of Delphi. When you invest time into your Delphi code you invest in the future with code that lasts the test of time.
Check out the full source code archive for Thieves’ Guild in Turbo Pascal over on Github.
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