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Royal Game of UR


Vorticon

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OK not sure what going on with ramidavis... He starts a post on that game, creates excellent graphics for it, then suddenly completely abandons it, placing his work in the public domain. So I pick it up because it's an interesting historical game and the potential of creating an AI for it intrigues me.

I ended up coding a decent AI initially for Sharp 5500II handheld computer and then for the TI 99/4A. The former was converted by SIO2 to run on a Windows PC.

I sent ramidavis a message yesterday informing him that I had done the TI program, and today I found out that he re-labeled the initial tread from "abandoned" to "hijacked by Vorticon" (????) and erases all of his posts. Now he even deleted the title of the thread itself.

 

Rather than re-post all the content of the initial thread, I figured I'll just point to it here: http://atariage.com/forums/topic/272927--/page-1

Link to the TI version in post #9 below.

 

The human mind can be deeply mysterious... :?

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Ah yes I had forgotten about that... Not sure why he would delete the thread title though on top of his postings. That's just disrespectful to those of us who spent a non-trivial amount of time picking up his unfinished idea and fleshing it out into full playable versions. Frankly, he's acting as if he's upset that we have done that even though he did not want to have anything to do with it any more and my guess is that this made him feel "inadequate" for lack of a better term. What he may not understand is that not everyone can code, but every one can contribute meaningfully in many other ways, and his contribution was the great graphics he designed.

Too bad...

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I went looking for a nice high-resolution printable game board for the Royal Game of Ur, and failing to find anything (particularly in a vector format), I fired up my favorite vector drawing program and created my own version. I printed it out, grabbed a standard 6-sided die (rolling a six is ignored and the player just rolls again), fourteen 2x2 round LEGO pieces, and my 15-year-old daughter to give it a whirl. It was pretty fun and actually very fast paced. I won the first game, then she played her brother and she won against him. They both enjoyed it and they were amazed when I told them how old it was.

 

I have not tried the electronic version yet, but to me this is a game that needs to move quickly. My kids were grabbing and rolling the die even before the other had finished their move. I'm not sure if you can capture that kind of action in the computer version?

 

Anyway, I have attached the game board I created if anyone else wants to try it in the real world. :-)

 

royal_game_of_ur.pdf

post-24952-0-37480700-1514967342_thumb.png

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Love it!!!

One could even have fun adding color to it with paint or pencils and glue it to a thick foam board. One could do the same with the tokens. As for the dice, you can just use standard D4 ones and simply mark 2 corners with white paint. Really nice job :thumbsup: :thumbsup: :thumbsup:

As for computer play, I have yet to find or create an electronic conversion of a board game that truly captures real play with a real board against a real person. That is why gaming clubs still thrive because you just can't beat that experience... I don't know if you saw the video of the gameplay for my version of UR, and then compare it to the one made by Irving Finkle (link in the description), but it conveys your point perfectly.

Here are all the links:

 

https://youtu.be/nokCLwDM8G0

 

post-25753-0-38661800-1514981302.gif

post-25753-0-87127300-1514981311.gif

 

GAMEOFUR.dsk

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I believe your answer is here: http://atariage.com/forums/topic/273270-goodbye-a-thread-for-those-who-want-to-jump-ship/

 

I also note that he has removed all the content from his other threads as well.

 

FWIW, I locked the original thread and changed the title back. I completely missed that he was doing that but apparently someone else caught his activity because his "goodbye" thread is locked and his posts are still there, and it looks like he may be banned or at least had his account removed. Thread sabotage is unnecessary, and I am not certain what his problem really is or was but I hope he gets over it. He showed a genuine interest and enthusiasm which we all really enjoy around here.

 

Anyway, my intention is not to hijack this thread and that is all I have to say. Back to your regularly scheduled programming fun!

Edited by OLD CS1
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Love it!!!

One could even have fun adding color to it with paint or pencils and glue it to a thick foam board. One could do the same with the tokens. As for the dice, you can just use standard D4 ones and simply mark 2 corners with white paint. Really nice job :thumbsup: :thumbsup: :thumbsup:

As for computer play, I have yet to find or create an electronic conversion of a board game that truly captures real play with a real board against a real person. That is why gaming clubs still thrive because you just can't beat that experience... I don't know if you saw the video of the gameplay for my version of UR, and then compare it to the one made by Irving Finkle (link in the description), but it conveys your point perfectly.

Here are all the links:

 

https://youtu.be/nokCLwDM8G0

 

attachicon.gifUR Opening Screen.gif

attachicon.gifUR Ingame.gif

 

attachicon.gifGAMEOFUR.dsk

 

Hey Vorticon I just wanted to say nice job on making this game run.

I will get to a Forth version eventually. I have the screen layout done, but need to built an interface like yours and implement your AI in structured code.

 

But here here! You made a nice game

 

B

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  • 1 month later...

That is very cool! I assume the stone tablet at the top is instructions? But what are the four sticks at the bottom left? I also wonder if the graphics on the board has significance, or if they were just shapes that the creator liked? It sure would be fun to go back in time to observe this game being played! Hey, if humans ever discover faster than light travel then maybe we could catch the light from the earth as it was centuries ago and see how it was played. :-)

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That is very cool! I assume the stone tablet at the top is instructions? But what are the four sticks at the bottom left? I also wonder if the graphics on the board has significance, or if they were just shapes that the creator liked? It sure would be fun to go back in time to observe this game being played! Hey, if humans ever discover faster than light travel then maybe we could catch the light from the earth as it was centuries ago and see how it was played. :-)

 

The sticks were apparently alternatives to throwing dice. They are used with the Egyptian game Senet as well. And yes, the tablet is actually a set of advanced rules for the game. No one truly knows what the symbols on the board mean, and it is possible that they were purely decorative since no other board has ever been found to compare.

You should watch the miniseries The Langoliers for an interesting take on time :)

It was an eerie feeling getting so close to that game at the museum and imagining the countless games played by now forgotten people with it.

 

On a side note, I purchased what was supposed to be a faithful reproduction of the game at the British Museum store for a hefty 80BP's, like the one shown in the video by Irvin Finkle, only to find out that it was not even close. A real scam if you ask me.

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Thanks for this! I thoroughly enjoyed playing a few rounds. It's pretty snappy when run in MacV9T9 with some acceleration. The computer plays a cutthroat game, it's tough to beat it!

 

One thing I noticed is no onsceen display of the dice roll. The graphics for them seem to be there at least in part, but so far I haven't been able to get them to display. For now, I added a simple display of the ROLL variable for each player.

 

I love the board in the British Museum! I'm thinking I'll print it out on card stock and glue it to a wood base. Sandy has plenty of buttons to use as tokens.

 

I'm glad the original project didn't end up abandoned.

-Ed

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Thanks for this! I thoroughly enjoyed playing a few rounds. It's pretty snappy when run in MacV9T9 with some acceleration. The computer plays a cutthroat game, it's tough to beat it!

 

One thing I noticed is no onsceen display of the dice roll. The graphics for them seem to be there at least in part, but so far I haven't been able to get them to display. For now, I added a simple display of the ROLL variable for each player.

 

I love the board in the British Museum! I'm thinking I'll print it out on card stock and glue it to a wood base. Sandy has plenty of buttons to use as tokens.

 

I'm glad the original project didn't end up abandoned.

-Ed

 

Glad you enjoyed it :) Not sure why the dice roll display is not showing up properly for you. It works fine under Classic99, so I guess it must be an issue with MacV9T9?

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Interesting! I haven't noticed compatibility issues with MacV9T9 before and I've used it for years. To run Classic99 on my older Mac, I also have to use a PC emulator, such as VPC5, which runs Classic99 so slowly I haven't tried it much.

 

The DOS version of V9T9, run under DOXbox on my Mac, is the same. No Dice. LOL, pardon the pun!

-Ed

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Interesting! I haven't noticed compatibility issues with MacV9T9 before and I've used it for years. To run Classic99 on my older Mac, I also have to use a PC emulator, such as VPC5, which runs Classic99 so slowly I haven't tried it much.

 

The DOS version of V9T9, run under DOXbox on my Mac, is the same. No Dice. LOL, pardon the pun!

Have you tried using Wine on Mac to run Classic99? The speed is good in my experience on a 2013 Macbook Air.

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D-oh! The dice were there all the time, just too small on my emulator screen size to see the tiny white corners. So I left my numeric ROLL display in place. I thought they were just arrows pointing to the board, how dumb can I be?

 

My Mac is a PPC Mirror Door Mac. For me, despite some quirks, the ancient MacV9t9 is faster on this old PPC Mac than anything else I've tried. It runs under Classic or native os9.

 

My wife's MBpro has wine. I'll have to look at it again. I tried double clicking the Classic99 app and a popup said it wouldn't run a Windows program. Yet I know something "PC" I tried a month or so ago auto-loaded Wine and ran that program. It has run the updated osX version of V9T9, but since I updated her system to 10.11, I apparently need to also update Java to run it.

 

I'd love to enlarge the board to improve details, but that would require a major rewrite of the nifty engine Vorticon created. I may try anyway, it would sure rehone my XB programming skills. :)

-Ed

Edited by Ed in SoDak
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