A custom virtual machine for the Stars 4X game

Blast from the past. Used to love playing this game as a kid.

Very neat! I hope we'll see more of this kind of work. Most games are well-behaved enough to simply run in Dosbox, an emulator, or through Wine, but there are a few tough nuts there that either need a very specific config, or just actual hardware. Having a known good config wrapped up in a VM seems like a great solution.

Wow, Stars! I loved this game so much as a child. Back then, after upgrading from shareware I had to wait for a floppy disk to arrive in the mail.

I loved stars! and really wish that it gets reimagined for the modern age. Stellaris gets way too micro-managing to be fun IMHO.

I forget whether it was steam or GE-Proton I ran it under but ran just fine on Linux. Have to say, I did crash out after 40 turns though, which is ridiculous, after thinking so much about Stars! for so long.

News here: there's an MCP server!! Oh snap!! This is great. I really love the idea of games that have external interfaces. There's a ton of tiny macro to stars, and being able to say, get every warship in the sector over to that planet at the same time with efficient fuel usage would be a lovely awesome thing to watch happen.

I look forward to more and more games having MCP (or other external interfaces). I'm sure there's others out there already, but definitely happy to see Stars! pointing the way forward yet again, decades latter.