I like the answer "Multi-User-Games do not like a Multi-Process-Structure."
Single player text games such as the Crowther and Woods Adventure can be written as a loop where the game waits for input, generates a response, etc. Multi-player text games like MUD [2] are mixed initiative (like chat programs) because an action of player 1 can interrupt player 2 entering a move. Between that and the need for shared data structures, it would be common for a game like that to use some kind of cooperative multi-tasking inside a single process using the select or poll system call for I/O even on an OS like Unix which does support multiple processes.
You could have coded up a game like that just find on a single-user OS so long as your machine supported multiple decent serial ports with UARTs.
> Single player text games such as the Crowther and Woods Adventure can be written as a loop where the game waits for input, generates a response, etc.
You don't need to wait for turns as you would in a board game - the only difference is that the game state can be mutated from outside the game process for a single user. The process doesn't even need to wait for their user's movement to re-read the game state and refresh information from other players that might be visible.
> You could have coded up a game like that just find on a single-user OS so long as your machine supported multiple decent serial ports with UARTs.
That would have the disadvantage of hogging up the ports. Anyone who logged in with that terminal would be in the game and not in the OS command prompt.
The claim about bank-switching being slow, to me, was a good indication the person has no direct knowledge of how 8-bit computers addressed more memory than their native address spaces.
Single player text games such as the Crowther and Woods Adventure can be written as a loop where the game waits for input, generates a response, etc. Multi-player text games like MUD [2] are mixed initiative (like chat programs) because an action of player 1 can interrupt player 2 entering a move. Between that and the need for shared data structures, it would be common for a game like that to use some kind of cooperative multi-tasking inside a single process using the select or poll system call for I/O even on an OS like Unix which does support multiple processes.
You could have coded up a game like that just find on a single-user OS so long as your machine supported multiple decent serial ports with UARTs.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colossal_Cave_Adventure
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multi-user_dungeon