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Well, today was far more exciting than I had anticipated and there is some bad and good news to share
For the bad news, I got surprised today by the Victory! processing computer that appears to have finally died of old age
Victory!, for those of you who have haven't been with us that long, was designed specifically to run on a Macintosh computer back in 1991 and the last hardware/code upgrade was around 1994. The game remained popular and continued to run well despite its age and various game mechanics quirks so we kept putting off designing its' replacement even though we knew the hardware was getting ancient. The old computer was hanging in there and it was a dangerous situation but we were just hoping we could continue until we could get some time to develop the next version of Victory! and move over to a modern system before something bad happened. It's tricky when the admin dept, processing dept, design dept and every other debt for the entire company is staffed by the same two guys though There just never seems to be enough time in the day I've got a few more things to try but I'm not confident that I can fix issue, which appears to be hardware related. Replacement hardware is not available and I can't bring backup data over to a different computer, the hardware and code are just too old and different. I am hoping I can get the computer up and stable long enough to run the end of game routines for each game so that we can at least see who was winning in each game as of December 18th but I think that may be a long shot. Without a Christmas miracle of some kind I'm afraid that all Victory! games have, in effect, ended early
I do have copies of the last turn results run for every position so we can look at those for winners and such. The original Victory! had a good run, over 18 years, and it remained popular and a good game...it just got tired of waiting for an update 
The good news in all this is that I now have time for a development project
Given the popularity of Victory! over the years I think the best thing to do at this point is to immediately start work on Victory! II with the idea of getting the game updated to modern equipment/code and with the game design revisited so that we solve any quirks of the old game, add as many new things as we can and make a new Victory! game that will be even better! I know it is disconcerting, to say the least, to have your ongoing wars end so abruptly and to face the prospect of time without Victory! to play but Pete and I aren't going anywhere so this is just a break in the action - we'll have you back playing Victory! and beating on each other as soon as we can 
I have some SuperNova related work to finish up on tonight but I'll be getting started on Project Victory! tomorrow
I'll be setting up a Project Victory! area here on the forums and I'd like as much input as I can get from you guys. Look over your old turn results, think about past games and think about what you liked, what you didn't like, what you'd like to see in a new version, etc. and we'll get to work. My current thoughts are to stay with the current game map (for a variety of reasons) and to keep as much of the good stuff as we can. We still want it to be Victory! and we want to have a game to play soon so we want to keep the parts that work and then improve on it and add new stuff where we can. New features (standing orders for example), new units for existing tech trees, new tech trees (Italian, French, etc.), special units (V1 rockets, etc.) new combat routines and whatever else we can come up with are all possible. Games that start before 1939, last after 1945, a WWI version, a Korean War version maybe...lots and lots of possibilities 
The first order of business, of course, is to get the base game ready so we can get Victory! going again but with this new version to work from the future for Victory! will be very bright and very interesting 
It hasn't been the most pleasant of days here and I know how sad this turn of events is for everybody who loves Victory! and was having fun crushing (or being crushed by) their enemies but I hope we can turn it around and focus on the positive aspects of getting a new version of Victory! for us to work and play with
With some hard work on this end and a lot of help from all you Victory! vets I think we can get a new version done within a couple months or so (the sooner the better of course) and when it's ready we'll have a better game for everyone to play (and for us to run) Take care, happy holidays and best wishes for the new year!
Russ
P.S. Please pass the word to allies and friends (who may not visit the forums often or at all) so that we can get the word out as fast as possible. It's not a happy day to be sure but we'll get through it and hopefully the future will be a lot more fun and exciting when we do.
for the time being...). I've got the replacement set of hardware from our local MAC shop and it seems to be running fine (hardware wise it's actually better than what I was running before). Just to make it exciting though I had some software issues that popped up after I plugged in the new hardware and ran some diagnostics... For a while it was looking grim but several nerve-racking hours later and I think I was able to solve the issues (there goes another year of my life and a significant increase in the percentage of grey hair I have... 
). All my Victory! tests have gone ok and I've generated end of game results for every game as of the 18th (just in case). 
