PlanetsCentral

I've been messing around trying to get a working offline PHost setup with PList 3.2 and a computer player (any). But I haven't succeeded.

Just wondering if anyone smarter than me out there could build such a setup that works under Win64 (or under WSL2/Ubuntu is fine too)?

PHost itself should be trivial; the Win32 version should run just fine under Win64. If it doesn't, that's a bug.

Computer players are harder because all that I know are 16-bit DOS so we need emulation. In particular script-friendly emulation is hard to come by. This is the main reason why there is no Tim-Host support on PlanetsCentral yet.

I am actually using DOSEMU under Linux to run build scripts. With some trickery, this allows me to run e.g. the compiler to build PCC1, and get output on the console, which is the same technology you'd need for running a host or cplayer. However, DOSEMU seems to be pretty unmaintained and has been removed from Debian, and probably does not run in WSL, so I cannot really recommend that.

I would therefore propose exploring DOSBOX. That runs fine under all operating systems.

One possible setup could be: native PHost, and SpaceLord inside DOSBOX, with a dosbox.conf that just runs SpaceLord and then exits. SpaceLord is unique in that it runs client-side, so you can treat it like any player, and it need not be tightly coupled to host. You run PHost for the turn, then play your turn normally, and run DOSBOX-with-SpaceLord for the opponent turn (commands in [autoexec] section).

Another possible setup could be: PHost for DOS and any cplayer, both inside DOSBOX. You play your turn, and then run DOSBOX-with-host-script-inside for hosting.

--Stefan