
Habitat – a massively multiplayer online role-playing game for the Commodore 64 - hitr
https://github.com/Museum-of-Art-and-Digital-Entertainment/habitat
======
EvanAnderson
I wondered what this looked like. I found a promo video
([https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VVpulhO3jyc](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VVpulhO3jyc))
and some apparently VCR-recorded gameplay
([https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KTtIzLZGNLw](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KTtIzLZGNLw)).

There are some interesting notes in the file at [https://github.com/Museum-of-
Art-and-Digital-Entertainment/h...](https://github.com/Museum-of-Art-and-
Digital-Entertainment/habitat/blob/master/chip/habitat/docs/hostguide.t) re:
architecture.

------
gulpahum
The repository should really mention the origin of the source code and the
license. I'm always a bit skeptical about the legality of ancient source code
suddenly popping up.

The origin is mentioned in their blog post. Very nice that Fujitsu has given
the rights to release the source code. There are still parts missing, so let's
hope that AOL will be as generous.

[https://themade.org/posts/1701](https://themade.org/posts/1701)

~~~
empath75
I'd be surprised if AOL still had the qlink code sitting around in an easily
accessible format. I think that's more of an issue than the legal problems.

~~~
VonGuard
Legal is the problem. They have the code. We've confirmed that fact.

------
VonGuard
Hey gang, I'm the guy behind the MADE. I'm available to answer any specific
Habitat questions you may have. Additionally, we're in #made on Freenode,
where we frequently discuss ancient computers. Feel free to drop in if you
have any thoughts or questions about the project.

What we really need is to start talking to AOL legal about QLink code, as we
know they have the code, we just need to get it into a form we can publicly
preserve. That means legal chatter time.

------
joslin01
Don't miss out on the lessons as well:
[http://web.stanford.edu/class/history34q/readings/Virtual_Wo...](http://web.stanford.edu/class/history34q/readings/Virtual_Worlds/LucasfilmHabitat.html)

~~~
grenoire
Reading the stories here shows how deep and rich the interactions between the
players and the world were. It's basically a very retro Second Life; the
original, in fact. Amazing achievement, and really funny seeing developers not
'cheat' to deal with their own mistakes and failures (e.g. trading Death's
one-shot kill gun for money in a town square after Death was killed and
dropped that gun, because he forgot to heal).

------
btown
There's a great tech transfer doc here that describes the game mechanics:

[https://themade.org/posts/732](https://themade.org/posts/732)

And another post about the compiler used for Habitat:

[http://sdtimes.com/sd-times-blog-macross-6502-on-
github/](http://sdtimes.com/sd-times-blog-macross-6502-on-github/)

~~~
EvanAnderson
Thanks for the link to The MADE's site. They've got a post on the open-
sourcing of Habitat, too:
[https://themade.org/posts/1701](https://themade.org/posts/1701)

------
dccoolgai
Club Caribe. For people of a certain age... which is much older than the
average HN reader, this was the pixellated magic of the internet. Your friends
at school didn't even believe you when you tried to tell them about it.

~~~
LarryMade2
Yep I visited it a couple times - I recall the rampant head hunting going on.

------
DodgyEggplant
Great reminder for the early lessons on social media, which didn't really
changed since:
[http://www.shirky.com/writings/herecomeseverybody/group_enem...](http://www.shirky.com/writings/herecomeseverybody/group_enemy.html)

------
hoodoof
I thought this might be a modern MMO for the C64.

------
mads
I remember reading about this "game" in a Danish computer magazine back in the
80's. Wanted to play it really bad, but of course there was no Internet back
then, so it wasn't possible.

------
erikb
For people who also don't know anything about it here is a video explaining a
little about it
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VVpulhO3jyc](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VVpulhO3jyc)

------
EdSharkey
Neat, I counted 240 bytes on their zero page reserved for application state.
They had 16 high speed bytes left for future expansion.

[https://github.com/Museum-of-Art-and-Digital-
Entertainment/h...](https://github.com/Museum-of-Art-and-Digital-
Entertainment/habitat/blob/master/habitat/Beta/Beta1.0/Source/zpage.m)

~~~
rzzzt
Addresses 0 and 1 are reserved for I/O on the 6510.

~~~
EdSharkey
Oh really? What kind of I/O? Something in my foggy memory said that first word
there was used to control bank switching on the GeoRam memory expansion unit.

~~~
rzzzt
6 I/O pins are exposed, the first three bits are used for bank switching, the
second three are for datasette control.

[https://www.c64-wiki.com/index.php/Bank_Switching#Expansion_...](https://www.c64-wiki.com/index.php/Bank_Switching#Expansion_Port)

[https://www.c64-wiki.com/index.php/Cassette_Port](https://www.c64-wiki.com/index.php/Cassette_Port)

------
visualphoenix
a cursory google search shows that apparently qlink has been reverse
engineered (
[http://orrtech.us/qlink/index.html](http://orrtech.us/qlink/index.html) ). I
wonder if this would help them...

~~~
visualphoenix
further google-fu shows
[https://github.com/ssalevan/qlink](https://github.com/ssalevan/qlink) and
[https://github.com/jasmaz/qlink](https://github.com/jasmaz/qlink) but it
looks like
[http://www.lyonlabs.org/commodore/qlink/](http://www.lyonlabs.org/commodore/qlink/)
they really do need the original qlink software to continue the work

~~~
VonGuard
We use QLink Reloaded, and Jasmaz is in our IRC channel to help. The issue is
that QLink uses a really byzantine system of communication with the server,
where it's constantly going"57, 26, 23" and each of those numbers means a very
distinct function. No one has a clue what those numbers mean, so QLink
Reloaded is basically only the bits that could be reverse engineered in this
black box situation.

We have modified QLink Reloaded for our purposes, though.

