Once about every two years I’ve had a dream where I was trying to recover and compile DikuMUD II. I think that dream has been recurring because the server I had it on stopped working and I was left with only the SCSI drive and I wasn’t sure it was working. Then in 2013 when I was living in London I brought the HD to a specialist recovery company. The HD was in fact broken. And for a small fortune they recovered all the data on it. That brought some consolation and I was glad to have the data back. It wasn’t until 2020 that I found the time to look more closely into it.
Firstly a few days ago I found in my old root folder two tar archives of what is likely the original Gamma and Alfa versions. My plan is to validate that against the GitHub versions I found and uploaded.
More excitingly, after writing with Ken Perry and Hans Henrik I decided to try to compile and release Diku II. So right now I’m 60% through removing compile errors and warnings. There are literally thousands of them since the compiler is a lot better today than it was in 1997. I found a few bugs which I fixed. Spend most of the time battling const compile errors. Found a few functions and pieces of code that are terrible. I’m trying to fix whatever I find with the least code possible.
When done DikuMUD II should compile and run Ubuntu 19 with g++. And then I’ll toss it up on GitHub together with all the zones. I’m still undecided if I want to first upload the original code and then my charges – or of I’ll just upload the version that I end up having as workable on a modern Linux. 🙂
Guessing that when I get through this process then I will have closed the loop and I won’t be dreaming about compiling DikuMUD II any longer :*)