Selden
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.Selden

Last edited by Aja Jin (6/16/2020 11:02 am)

Selden

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 https://github.com/jjaquinta/ChView
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

Surtac

Thanks Selden.

I’ll give strings a try.  And I’ll try running the app - I have an XP system in a VM under Oracle’s Virtualbox for running Civ II, so hopefully that will work.  I’ll let you know.

Also, if you or anyone else here wants a copy of the exe file (notwithstanding the issues in trying to run it), let me know.  It’s attribute metadata dates it to 1998, which sounds about right to me.

Surtac  

First off, a huge thank you to Selden for organising that.

I've had a quick look through the strings output and the A/U historical dates and events given seem to line up with those already given by CJ in the past.  So too does the stellar data - at least in terms of station locations and so forth.  I might also have half a mental handle too on some of the data structures used by ChView for the stellar data it uses - it looks familiar but I will need to compare it to some other old material I've compiled over the years.

---------

It's alive.  Here is ChView running in a Windows XP virtual machine on Windows 10 under Oracle VirtualBox.

https://www.dropbox.com/s/pi20xenslgaizqc/20200612_155713.jpg?dl=0+
 

From CJ's facebook Q&A thingy:

Question on Alliance Rising, etc. The stars referenced are real places.Nearest star to Sol is Proxima, part of the Alpha Centauri lot, that we used to think was one star. 

Next over is Barnard's Star, called Alpha for short, after its station. Ev Lacertae, called Galileo. A collection of Ross Objects, which are given numbers, like Ross 246, etc, a number of near red dwarfs (not baby red giants: different chemistry). They all, including Proxima and Barnard's, are extremely long lived, so dim that a living planet would have to snuggle close as Mercury, but dwarf reds are perhaps are prone to have rocky planets (and perhaps rocky debris: asteroiods)...gas giants being beyond their modest budget of original nebula gas. 

There's Bryant's Star, another red dwarf; 

Groombridge 34, which is another star that is more than one star: GX Andromedae is one. GQ Andr the other. They orbit the bary(weight)center of their space. That's Olympus. 

Then Venture, which was where the old Circle Trade ended. It's Kruger 50, A & B, a binary of reds. 

And finally Pell's Star, or Downbelow Station, at Tau Ceti, a G class like Sol, but much smaller, probably on the boderline of the dwarf reds. It is the closest non-binary to Sol. 

One other is worth mentioning: UV Ceti, a bad, bad star, that is not that far from Tau Ceti, and not FAR ENOUGH from Sol. UV Ceti is a star capable of loosing mega-flares that, their saving grace, are directional, so you're safe if the source happens to be facing another direction, which makes them rarer in afflicting its neighbors than they are in terms of what's being flung off in other directions. "Scattering' of light and radiation means it gets thinner the farhter it goes, but Earth is within the zone where a flare from UV Ceti could do us real hurt, and could have been responsible for one of the ancient mass extinctions. Not a thing we can do about it until we are so advanced we could park a Sol-saving shield somewhere out in space permanently obscuring Sol from UV Ceti's temper tantrums.

All these stars lie between 6 (I spare you the decimals) and 10 light years distance from each other, in a string leading to the most attractive prize out there (since Proxima didn't work out)---the g-class Tau Ceti, which has life beyond bacteria and slime molds.

Last edited by Aja Jin (6/18/2020 12:58 pm)