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emberreach:building

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Source and licence

Licence

Ember Reach is Copyright (C) 2026 Michael Slater.

It is free software: you may copy, change and share it under the terms of the GNU General Public License, version 2 or (at your option) any later version (the file COPYING). It comes with NO WARRANTY. If you share the programs, the source must be available too; it is in REACHS05.ZIP.

Building

The source builds with Free Pascal 3.2.2.

make                # Linux: bin/reach, bin/ermaint, bin/reachcfg
make windows        # 64-bit Windows: bin-win/*.exe (needs the win64 cross units)
sh dosbuild.sh      # DOS: bin-dos/*.exe (needs the i8086 cross compiler)
sh mkrelease.sh     # all of the above, then the release zips in release/

The units in src/:

Unit What it does
reach.pas The door: menus and screens (with erview*.pas and erscr.pas)
ermaint.pas Maintenance and test commands
reachcfg.pas The sysop's set-up program
erdata.pas The game's records and REACH.DAT
ergen.pas Making a galaxy and joining houses
erturn.pas The nightly turn: lane drift, movement, battles, landings, the Hollow, production, research, victory
erai.pas The computer houses
erorders.pas Orders, with the rules for what is allowed
ersetup.pas REACH.CFG, new games, news and the Hall of Fame
erlock.pas, ersess.pas The game lock, so doors and maintenance never change the game at the same time
doorkit.pas The door kit: drop files, the connection and the console

The game files are byte-for-byte the same on every system: a 30-day computer game (ermaint sim 6 30 99) gives the same REACH.DAT on Linux, Windows and DOS. On DOS (i8086) Integer is 16 bits, so the code uses LongInt throughout, and never uses two random numbers in one expression.

Credits

  • The door's console code (doorkit.pas) follows the design of dorkit.js from Synchronet BBS. Its line editor, ConGetStr, is a translation of dorkit.js's getstr by Stephen Hurd (Deuce), under the GNU GPL.
  • Synchronet BBS by Rob Swindell and the Synchronet developers.
  • Free Pascal by the Free Pascal team.
emberreach/building.txt · Last modified: by 127.0.0.1