Games on Unix and HP-UX
While HP-UX was mostly used for engineering and design software during the PA-RISC heydays, several games were ported to and played on HP-UX Unix in the 1990s.
| Collections | Action | Strategy | Simulators | Arcade | Others |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Open source Arcade Board Networking |
Doom Quake |
SimCity Civilization Dominion |
ACM flight | Maelstrom Battalion |
PEX drive ClassiCube OpenTTD |
The roster of commercial games and their ports included various well-known titles from the 1990s, with many games known to be working or having worked on HP-UX. This included many iconic 3D games from the early 1990s, compiled with OpenGL but also some other, semi-commercial ports of well-known games and the big universe of Unix and X11 freeware games.
Most games were ported HP-UX 10.20 from the late 1990s, with some newer ports targeting HP-UX 11.00 or HP-UX 11.11. Long dormant, some ports were rediscovered or adapter in the 2010s and 2020s again.
Collections
Many freeware games collections were available for Unix and often could be compiled on various versions of HP-UX.
- Unix Guru Universe: Games Software, source files from asteriods to xtrek
- HP-UX Porting Center: Games (Arcade) includes many X11 games as binaries
- HP-UX Porting Center: Games (Board) for strategy and traditional board games
- HP-UX Porting Center: Games (Networking) for games played over networks
Note some of these ports and packages are several decades old, so might need tweaking to run on newer HP-UX versions post-10.20.
Action
Doom
Doom from id Software, the first-person shooter game from 1993, runs also on several Unix platforms and Linux since an unofficial port in 1994.
An HP-UX version is available through Doom It Yourself from the early 2000s, based on id LinuxDoom sources. HP-UX needs some modifications (2020).
Doom was apparently installed as easteregg on HP Agilent 16700 logic analyzers, see also Reddit.
Quake
It seems Quake and Quake2 were ported to Unix and HP-UX specifically, but few documentation and resources exist. CQ3A, a Quake3 renderer for CAVE apparently supports HP-UX.
An attempt was made to port Quake3 to newer HP-UX but the status is unclear.
Strategy
A few strategy and turn-based games were developed and ported to HP-UX, including well-known Simcity and Civilization.
Simcity
There are two Simcity version for Unix – one is original DUX port and the second is Micropolis, a re-release for the OPLC program.
Simcity, the multiplayer interactive strategy game, was ported by DUX in the early 1990s to Unix systems and distributed pretty widely as demo software in the Unix community.
Simcity has been recently liberated with some modifications and fixes. It is known to be running on HP-UX 9, possibly also later versions HP-UX 10 and 11, it runs on X11 (Motif and Tcl) and can be played over the network with multiple players
Micropolis for Vintage Unix uses Simcity parts and is a fork of Linux Micropolis for X11. The SimCity source was originally re-released as Micropolis during the OLPC (One Laptop Per Child) program when that game was shipped as part of OLPC laptops.
Micropolis now supports newer HP-UX versions for HP 64-bit computers: 11i v1 for PA-RISC and HP-UX 11i v3 for HP Itanium.
Civilization (Freeciv)
There never was an official Civilization port, but Freeciv, an open source game inspired by it has been developed since the 1990s.
Freeciv is a free and open turn-based strategy game, inspired by Civilization concepts. Internet and LAN multiplayer are supported plus many languages and platforms. Gameplay is in X11. Freeciv was started in the mid-90s by students, after trying the Python/Tcl-based OpenCiv.
Freeciv apparently supports HP-UX and other commercial Unix platforms in source, but no pre-compiled package repositories or current ports are known.
Dominion
Dominions: Priests Prophets & Pretenders, a turn-based fantasy game available for many Unixes and runs on HP-UX in some older versions as a demo.
For HP 9000 an old HP-UX port is available with HP-UX 10.20 and newer, however with no sound and officially unsupported.
Simulator
ACM flight simulator
ACM Flight Simulator, a graphical flight simulator for jet aircraft, on X11. ACM has been developed since the 1990s for Windows and Unix, with the last version being 5.0.
Packages of ACM are available for HP-UX for HP-UX versions 11.11 (PA-RISC) to 11.31 (Itanium). ACM runs on X11, supports network play for up to eight clients, and simulates jet aircraft
Arcade
Maelstrom
Maelstrom is a 2D space shooter originally developed for Macintosh MacOS in the 1990s. Maelstrom gameplay is based on old Atari games – Asteriods and Blasteriods of the 1980s
After Maelstrom was open sourced, it was later ported to Linux as Maelstrom 3.0. This Linux source also runs on various HP-UX versions. Maelstrom HP-UX 11 on PA-RISC is available at the OS archive.
Battalion
battalion, an arcade game developed in 1994 on Silicon Graphics for OpenGL runs on many operating systems. Originally developed on Unix (IRIX), it has been ported to other Unixes, various Windows versions and even iPhones, battalion uses OpenGL graphics and had been adapted to use CAVE virtual reality environment.
For HP 9000, a newer (2024) HP-UX port is available at OS archive.
Others
There were several other games that had been ported to HP-UX or were planned to, as there were or are Linux or other Unix ports.
- PEX Drive, was a demo from HP Graphics Labs to showcase the HP PEX library
- ClassiCube, an open replication of Minecraft Classic, for which a port to HP-UX is in progress
- OpenTTD, an open source simulation game similar to Transport Tycoon, runs on Linux and Unix systems. An HP-UX port might be possible.
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