> the authors couldn’t afford to build a sloppy, wasteful UI, and so by modern standards the game UI is remarkably fast and responsive. They don’t make ‘em like they used to.

I also miss this aspect of old windows games. "Castle of the Wind" the RPG is another example of a game that unashamedly uses Windows' built-in UI elements just fine. I wish more games just stuck to them. Then things like pressing tab to cycle focus to different UI elements still works and developers wouldn't have to worry about introducing bugs in their custom UIs.

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.

The star map screenshot looks very similar to star map in "Remnants of the Precursors" [1], which is a modernization of 1993 "Master of Orion" [2]. Convergent evolution, or was 1995 Stars! an homage/clone of Orion?

1. https://rayfowler.itch.io/remnants-of-the-precursors

2. https://store.steampowered.com/app/410970/Master_of_Orion_1/

A pity Supernova was never finished. Stars! Without all the Econ micromanagement would have gotten rid of one of the bigger mechanical advantages someone with a lot of patience had.

Really cool effort but it might be better to just document the game mechanics really well, reimplement an open source version and then use it as a base to improve it, OpenTTD style. Stars! was fun for the day but had a lot of frustrating problems as well, in particular how much effort it required to complete a turn in the later stages due to the lack of automation features. And of course some nicer graphics wouldn't go amiss.

The hard part is knowing why exactly it was compelling despite apparently violating all the rules of good game design...

I kind of wish i had tried this when i was younger, but VGA Planets got hold of me first and teenage me apparently had stupid video game tribalism

I loved this game back in the day and was looking for a way to play it just last month! I will definitely be trying this.

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

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.

Stars is a great game. Its a bit dated now, but still has a lot of charm, is fun and interesting and nobody's quite made a game like it (actually they probably have I just don't know about it).

I used to absolutely love this game. I'm going to give it a try soon. Can't wait.

Oh my God, I thought I was the only one who remembered this game!

> I’m distributing 32-bit builds (but requires SSE2) because there’s no advantage to 64-bit here, and these builds work (almost) everywhere

Kinda ironic given the article's subject of 16-bit mode no longer being available...

Out of curiosity, any easy way to run this on Android?

Absolutely amazing. Can't wait to send out potato bugs and assemble scouts.

oh wow, idk where I got it from but I had a zip file of this game back in the later 90s. It might've come from one of the shareware cds I bought back then.

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.

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

I never thought I'd see someone else in the wild who remembers Stars! Next we'll be talking about Anacreon and Talisman.

I really loved this game as a kid, excited to give it another go!

Now if someone could publish a patch that overcomes the 10,000 fleet identifier limit!