I finally managed to play a game of 1830 with the SimTex computer version. I’ve tried before, but for some reason I haven’t done it… Now I got a reason so I played a game today. It was fun and I’ll definitely try it again.
The reason? I’m trying 1830 play-by-email, we’re running a game using Rails and Dropbox (referral link, we both get extra space if you use it to register). My opponents are proper sharks, so I thought I should try to get some experience to survive. I’ve only played once before (in JunaCon).
I played my first game today and won it hands down. I started PRR on the first round, sold C&A for 320, dumped PRR on the SR 2 to start C&O at $100, then started B&M too. The best bit was upgrading a 4 train to a diesel, causing my opponents to lose their precious 4 trains. Thanks to this, one of my opponents spent the rest of the game shuffling one train between two companies to avoid bankruptcy. That doesn’t make much money… My stock portfolio was filled with shares of the four best companies. I got almost as much money as my three opponents had in total. Next time I’ll try a bit harder difficulty level.
There’s quite a bit of waiting, though. I heard a patch will make it faster and I’ll have to take a look at the Dosbox settings to see if I can make the game run any faster that way. Well, I suppose I can wait a bit. It’s great how the game counts the routes, running diesels is no pain at all.
The graphics are bit… grainy. There’s an awful lot of detail stuffed on a small screen. The window — what used to be a full screen — is very small on my iMac, and it’s double the resolution of the original game! On my Mac it’s 640 x 400, but it was 320 x 200 back in 1993. 320 x 200 on my iMac would be about the size of a large stamp…
Well, I spent lots of time in 1993 playing PC games, so I’m used to that kind of graphics, but I still wish 1830 would be a SuperVGA game. I suppose 1993 was a bit too early for that.
Here’s some guy’s notes on being the lead programmer on the game. Interesting! Actually, that some guy is none other than Russ Williams, the author of the RussCon Multiplicative Ranking System (and I’m, actually, just about the only person in the world who’d say that).
I’m trying to get 1830 to run in my phone. That would be sweet.
