- Surtac
- Antipodean Assassin
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- From: With Ken Behrens in CBR, AU.
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Re: Alliance/Union books
Sure. After I've double and triple-checked against my other reference sources. 
It's a strange world. Let's keep it that way.
- selden
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Re: Alliance/Union books
Verifying what you learn seems to be a good idea in this case. My understanding is that the game is not strictly canon. (i.e. some things were changed in the interest of playability.)
Selden
- Surtac
- Antipodean Assassin
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Re: Alliance/Union books
selden wrote:
Verifying what you learn seems to be a good idea in this case. My understanding is that the game is not strictly canon. (i.e. some things were changed in the interest of playability.)
My understanding is similar. I’m not fussed about the game’s playability or otherwise as I don’t intend to play it. I’m more interested in where the copyright is held for the reference material it contains. Some is held by CJ and some is not.
There is inconsistency in some details that I need to resolve for my own research purposes. Worst case scenario is that I will have to go back to known CJ primary sources and rebuild my A/U star maps from scratch.
Such is life.
It's a strange world. Let's keep it that way.
- selden
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Re: Alliance/Union books
One difficulty is that although most of CJC's stars correspond to real stars, their distances from Earth sometimes differ by large amounts from the distances known today. Since the values used in the books were determined before Hubble, Hipparcos and Gaia, those distances were hard to measure with existing telescopes. This particularly true for the more distant stars. Of course, in the A/U universe, those "wrong" values are the correct ones to use.
I should have a table of distance value comparisons somewhere, if you're interested. (Presumably you wouldn't want to look at it until you've made your own determinations. We wouldn't want any "expectation bias" to creep into your work. 
) I don't recall if I included it in my A/U Addon for Celestia. Except for JumpPoints, the distance values that I used were primarily from Hipparcos. Brown dwarfs (the type of stars which are used for JPs) are so dim that even now not very many have been detected, so their positions all have to be imaginary. As I recall, The Company War used quite a few red dwarf stars instead, so that's one of their non-canon changes.
Selden
- selden
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Re: Alliance/Union books
Discussion moved
Hopefully you're aware that the original version of CHVIEW contained a lot of historical information about the A/U universe as text strings embedded in the binary code.
Last edited by Aja Jin (6/16/2020 11:07 am)
Selden
- Aja Jin
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- Registered: 4/06/2020
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Re: Alliance/Union books
Discussion moved
Hopefully you're aware that the original version of CHVIEW contained a lot of historical information about the A/U universe as text strings embedded in the binary code.
Most interesting. For those of us who don't dabble in binary, can you share ?
Last edited by Aja Jin (6/16/2020 11:08 am)
- Surtac
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Re: Alliance/Union books
Discussion moved
Hopefully you're aware that the original version of CHVIEW contained a lot of historical information about the A/U universe as text strings embedded in the binary code.
Yes, I'm aware of CHVIEW, but I'm not sure how much I can trust its content. I have an old text document from 1995 that I believe to be from the same sources that lists a lot of A/U reference material , some of which does simply not match up with CJ's own published reference material detailing the early history of what became A/U.
Still, it's probably worth running a hex-editor over the CHVIEW executable to see what's in there. The other question is - am I brave enough to try running it under Windows 10? I don't suppose the source is in a GIT repository somewhere these days?
Last edited by Aja Jin (6/16/2020 11:08 am)
It's a strange world. Let's keep it that way.
- Surtac
- Antipodean Assassin
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Re: Alliance/Union books
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Well, well, well. I just managed to find ChView in a GitHub repository. Another rabbit hole to add to the project.
I'd better go get me some more ferrets.
.
Last edited by Aja Jin (6/16/2020 11:09 am)
It's a strange world. Let's keep it that way.
- selden
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Re: Alliance/Union books
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Aja Jin.
I know I had it, but a brief search of backups didn't locate it. I recall running the original ChView in a WinXP virtual machine a few years ago while helping Jo Grant debug an updated variant which finally came to naught. The new version was for another author, Chuck Ganon, so it contained no A/U references. So far I've only looked at maybe half of my backups. Maybe I'll find it yet. The online copies don't seem to exist any more (dead links). Maybe they're available on Archive.org.
As Surtac-ji mentioned, there seems to be a copy on GitHub at
Unfortunately, though, it's the new version, not the original. The only resemblances are its name and some aspects of its user interface. 
Wow. That was 5 years ago already. How time flies
Last edited by Aja Jin (6/16/2020 11:09 am)
Selden
- selden
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Re: Alliance/Union books
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Surtac-ji,
Unfortunately the original version of ChView won't run under any current version of Windows. Certainly not Win7 or newer. It was written for Windows 3.1 and Windows 95. That's why I had to run it in a VM under WinXP, which was able to run it.
There's a Linux utility, strings, which extracts all plain text from binary files. I've used strings under Cygwin, which provides linux utilities under Windows. It should be in the new Linux Subsystem for Windows, but I've never used that.
Aha: there's a copy of strings for Windows available at I've never tried it, though.
Last edited by Aja Jin (6/16/2020 11:09 am)
Selden
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