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1. Jason Lefkowitz (jalefkowit@octodon.social)'s status on Monday, 02-Jan-2023 14:24:10 JST Jason Lefkowitz

   One of my favorite computer games as a kid was "Buzz Aldrin's Race Into Space" (1993), which put you in charge of either the U.S. or Soviet space program circa 1957 and challenged you to build a program that could put a man on the Moon before your opponent (human or A.I.) did.

   Among other things, it provided a window into just how absolutely fucking terrifying early space flight must have been, as each mission depends on an entire stack of complicated technologies working absolutely flawlessly -- some of which are just inherently dangerous, and others of which you may have (ahem) cut a few corners on in order to get to a budget-boosting prestige accomplishment first. All it takes is one little failure anywhere in the stack to bring your mission -- and with it, your budget -- crashing down.

   There have been attempts to remake it over the years, but I've never seen one that really lived up to it. So I was happy to see that the original game has been open-sourced, and a community of developers has been working hard to bring it from its MS-DOS roots to all modern platforms. Heck, there's even a Flatpak now.

   Here's the GitHub for the project, which has more info on how you can install and/or compile it:

   https://github.com/raceintospace/raceintospace