Old Computer Challenge 2026

Texinfo is weird

Making some progress today writing my mini tabletop RPG. This far, this mostly involves copying and reformatting parts of the 1992 version of the FUDGE RPG, before adding my own rules and background. Given how fast this went, I don't think I'll be able to include all of it and will postpone and adventure for beyond the OCC.

The good thing: It's fun enough that this means that it'll just take a few days longer. I might have to pause it a bit for another "RPG Jam" I'm participating in, but end of July seems doable.

But let's talk a bit about my choice of implementation system, Texinfo.

Hypertext documentation

Let's start briefly with the intention of the "GNU Info system": It's meant to provide a hypertext way of documenting GNU programs (others too, but basically nobody's interested). Something man pages couldn't provide, which lead to someone at GNU (probably Stallman?) deciding that they're going for extensive info documentation instead of the well-known and industry-standard Unix man pages. As they say, this had made many people very angry and has been widely regarded as a bad move.

It's not like hypertext documentation wasn't well known on other platforms, Amiga had one quite early with its "Amiga Guide", and Windows had its help files.

GNU info suffered from a decent enough help browser. The info application was/is a bit lackluster. Emacs users had info as their standard documentation and thus it is well integrated, but this doesn't matter that much to the non-converted.

And at a certain point in time, everyone moved to HTML for hyperlinked documentation. Windows had its ".chm" format for this, "compiled HTML pages", and doesn't even support the old ".hlp" files anymore. The Linux desktops provide what little help they offer in that format, too.

But also a floor polish!

If you look at a basic Texinfo document, you notice something odd:

\input texinfo
@settitle Sample Document
@node First Chapter
@chapter First Chapter

@cindex chapter, first

This is the first chapter.

Texinfo uses the @ character as the prefix for its internal commands, but the first line still starts with a backslash: \input. This is done because doing that, all of Texinfo basically is a TeX macro package. You can create a print-ready file with the default tex tool, it'll find the texinfo macro package and from there you get a PDF these days (a ".dvi" file in days gone by).

Neat, implementation-wise, but still a bit odd. Why go for these odd-ball at-signs in the first place?

In the beginning, there was Scribe

Creating printed products used to be a big thing. Hard to believe these days, right? Unix itself started out as a glorified writing system: You got an editor, tools to search text or do other preprocessing, then you sent it off to either an expensive printer, or a very expensive typesetter.

One popular language (a "markup language", if you will) introduced in those early days managed to not look like line noise: Scribe.

@Heading(The Beginning)
@Begin(Quotation)
    Let's start at the very beginning, a very good place to start
@End(Quotation)

Quite understandable. And also not that unlike HTML and its predecessor SGML. But you got that at-sign there. Scribed created quite a few imitators, so before everyone went googly-eyed for lesser-than and greater-than signs, we got this.

• On DOS, you had FinalWord (later Sprint by Borland) that combined what we'd call a text editor with this markup language. If I ever get a legal copy of Borland Sprint along with some documentation, I know what I'll do for the OCC.
• For a short time, "lout" seemed like a competitor for LaTeX on Linux. It created Postscript files directly, no DVI files as an intermediate format, was faster and looked cleaner.
• And of course you've got Texinfo.

Note: What will I actually write?

Time ran away from me a bit. Today was both filled with work after being out sick for a while, and I also had to run my online RPG session. There's no way I can do that with an old computer, so I sat in front of my work Mac for most of the day. Fun was had, but not old computer fun.

So it's going to be a sprint about what to put in. As I've said, I'm currently spending some time copying the relevant FUDGE rules from the original free version. The major change I'm doing there is dropping all the "ordinary words" from the rules. The game tried to get away from numbers and go for the allegedly more descriptive descriptors:

1. Superb
2. Great
3. Good
4. Fair
5. Mediocre
6. Poor
7. Terrible

So you've got a "Good Climbing" skill, and your dice provide you with a number between -4 and +4, so you go down or up from there and get a result. Let's say you want to scale a difficult piece of mountain, so the game master requires you to get a "Great" roll. If you got a "Good" skill, that means you need to get at least a "+1" to raise your result to that level.

I'm not the biggest fan of that. I never can remember whether "Fair" or "Mediocre" is worse, never mind translating that on the fly. Numbers are numbers in every language, and they're easier to work with. No "shifting up" to get a "Great" success, you just call for a "+2" result. I've grown used to people having some serious issues with even that level of math and numbers in general, but 90s Pinkdaisy wasn't that wise yet, so numbers it is.

We also don't need vehicle rules or other non-fantasy mechanics, and FUDGE in general is quite a concise game. There's lots of options but that just means picking one and not writing it in my game.

OCC TTRPG: The MVPing

To consider this ready for challenge release, I intend to include the following:

• Character creation (simple out of necessity)
• A handful of skills (~ 10 physical, 10 mental)
• Simple combat
• Travel rules
• Basic magic rules
• One magic tradition
• Short GM section, what adventures are about
• Basic world description, ~5-7 countries
• A bit of history

I might be able to do this by the end of OCC or not. The journey being the reward... But for a MVP release, something that's going to end on itch or RPG Trader, I want to add a few things more:

• More traditions. This is the "World of Darkness" 90s core of it. I'm aiming for five traditions that aren't just copy cats of each other.
• Intro fiction. Any 90s-inspired game needs this, quality doesn't matter.
• A short introductory adventure. Maybe even a choose-your-own-adventure solo for the very first steps?
• Better world documentation, including a map.
• A decent character sheet.

Coming this summer...

What I did today

• Flash card for the old camera arrived. Doesn't work in card reader. I will get another card tomorrow and might have another reader in some cardboard box.
• Tried a few editors. I could've gone way faster by just picking vi(m) or emacs on my old slackware system, but part of this OCC is not just moving my regular terminal environment to an older system.
• Played around a bit with Tcl/Tk for a short "notes" app.
• Failed to get the "bowman" window manager to compile. This was the first one that looked like NextStep, before AfterStep or WindowMaker.
• Got some other utilities to work. Rather close to some old desktop I once ran for surprisingly long.