7 ms·

I would imagine there's a lot of overlap between places that use mainframes and places where anything unauthorized, let alone games, will get you fired.

by kej 5y ago

123pie123 5y ago
many moons ago, I was lucky enough to have root (QSECOFR) access and treat the box as my personal play thing - even while running prod stuff. we could have put games on it, if we trusted the developer - well may be just the dev server. Windows NT 4 and Windows 3.11 was more interesting at the time with AOL dial up access
markus_zhang 5y ago
Agreed, that's my thought too.
ASalazarMX 5y ago
Definitely any company that could afford a (then) AS/400 wouldn't look kindly on using it for gaming. That being said, some did, otherwise these little games wouldn't exist. At one of my previous jobs, the end of the year was boring, no clients and projects would be on hold until January. One of those years I wasted a week making a crude reversi game complete with CPU player, and it was well received among the other programmers. We tried to make a checkers game, but turns out a checkers CPU player is a lot harder than reversi for business programmers.
- markus_zhang 5y ago
  Is it possible to make a gui game?
  - ASalazarMX 5y ago
    AFAIK it can only do text games, but I don't know what improvements IBM has made in two decades. The other limitation is that the terminal buffers input until you press Enter, then sends the entire screen, so only turn-based games are practical. The buffering is a neat feature. Your AS/400 could be extremely busy (sometimes the operator would prioritize a very urgent process), but you could do a screenful of code, then press Enter and go for a coffee.
    - reaperducer 5y ago
      This is why graybeards understand the difference between the [RETURN] key and the [ENTER] key. Accountants, too.
      - jaak 5y ago
        I believe the AS/400 calls it Field Exit. One of the things I used to do for new users was remap Field Exist to Enter in the IBM 5250 emulation software. Then the enter key acted like the user expected (on a real 5250 terminal there is a separate physical Enter key located where the right control key is on modern keyboards). Explaining Field Exit vs Enter was something most users didn't get. However, they did understand Enter as like a submit button (like on web pages) and were fine selecting fields with the mouse.
        ASalazarMX 5y ago
        It's been many years, but wasn't that a key that allowed you to change input fields, just like TAB does it with web pages? IIRC that key was managed purely client-side.
  - _-david-_ 5y ago
    It is my understanding there is a third party port of X to the machine. I would guess you would have to do X11 forwarding, but theoretically it could work.
    - skissane 5y ago
      Nowadays IBM supplies X11 as part of PASE - AIX X11 is included and IBM offers X.org for install using yum. But the OS doesn’t support graphics cards so X11 is either using Xvnc or X11 forwarding.
  - skissane 5y ago
    It has always been predominantly a text-oriented platform but there has been some graphics support over the years. IBM ported their mainframe graphics package GDDM to the AS/400. I don’t think many people used it but it could be used for drawing charts. It required a special version of the physical 5250 terminal with graphics support. Standard 5250 terminal emulators don’t support the graphics extensions; IBM had a 5250 emulator with graphics support for MS-DOS; apparently they never ported it to Windows or anything else. GDDM saw more use on IBM mainframes. On mainframes it has 3D graphics support with PHIGS as the API. Several late 70s / early 80s high-end CAD systems (such as CADAM and CATIA) used GDDM, before moving off the mainframe on to Unix (and later, Windows and Linux). Don’t think the 3D part was ever ported to OS/400 though, I think GDDM/400 is 2D only. At one point (years ago) IBM was pushing a technology called RAWT (Remote AWT) which is basically Java AWT over RMI. I don’t think it is supported any more but older versions of the 400/i JVM included the RAWT JAR. 400/i also ships with a (deprecated) Java/XML based GUI framework called Graphical Toolkit - however, it is actually intended to run on client machines (primarily Windows), not the host. The AIX compatibility environment (PASE) includes X11 ported from AIX (and more recently IBM has made X.org X11 available as well, which is more modern than AIX X11). I believe the only local X server supported though is Xvnc; the operating system doesn’t support graphics cards.
- Accujack 5y ago
  We still have two of them in production, running old heavily regulated applications from decades past. If we loaded games on them, I doubt anyone would notice for a while. Honestly though, I've had to take care of these dinosaurs for so long I can't stand to look at them much less log in if I don't have to do it.
markphip 5y ago
You would be surprised. I worked for an AS/400 ISV and while the customers were all huge companies, the part of the company that ran an AS/400 was usually very small and had a lot of autonomy.

I would imagine there's a lot of overlap between places that use mainframes and places where anything unauthorized, let alone games, will get you fired.

by kej 5y ago

I would imagine there's a lot of overlap between places that use mainframes and places where anything unauthorized, let alone games, will get you fired.

123pie123 5y ago

many moons ago, I was lucky enough to have root (QSECOFR) access and treat the box as my personal play thing - even while running prod stuff. we could have put games on it, if we trusted the developer - well may be just the dev server. Windows NT 4 and Windows 3.11 was more interesting at the time with AOL dial up access

markus_zhang 5y ago

Agreed, that's my thought too.

ASalazarMX 5y ago

Definitely any company that could afford a (then) AS/400 wouldn't look kindly on using it for gaming. That being said, some did, otherwise these little games wouldn't exist. At one of my previous jobs, the end of the year was boring, no clients and projects would be on hold until January. One of those years I wasted a week making a crude reversi game complete with CPU player, and it was well received among the other programmers. We tried to make a checkers game, but turns out a checkers CPU player is a lot harder than reversi for business programmers.

markus_zhang 5y ago
Is it possible to make a gui game?
- ASalazarMX 5y ago
  AFAIK it can only do text games, but I don't know what improvements IBM has made in two decades. The other limitation is that the terminal buffers input until you press Enter, then sends the entire screen, so only turn-based games are practical. The buffering is a neat feature. Your AS/400 could be extremely busy (sometimes the operator would prioritize a very urgent process), but you could do a screenful of code, then press Enter and go for a coffee.
  - reaperducer 5y ago
    This is why graybeards understand the difference between the [RETURN] key and the [ENTER] key. Accountants, too.
    - jaak 5y ago
      I believe the AS/400 calls it Field Exit. One of the things I used to do for new users was remap Field Exist to Enter in the IBM 5250 emulation software. Then the enter key acted like the user expected (on a real 5250 terminal there is a separate physical Enter key located where the right control key is on modern keyboards). Explaining Field Exit vs Enter was something most users didn't get. However, they did understand Enter as like a submit button (like on web pages) and were fine selecting fields with the mouse.
      - ASalazarMX 5y ago
        It's been many years, but wasn't that a key that allowed you to change input fields, just like TAB does it with web pages? IIRC that key was managed purely client-side.
- _-david-_ 5y ago
  It is my understanding there is a third party port of X to the machine. I would guess you would have to do X11 forwarding, but theoretically it could work.
  - skissane 5y ago
    Nowadays IBM supplies X11 as part of PASE - AIX X11 is included and IBM offers X.org for install using yum. But the OS doesn’t support graphics cards so X11 is either using Xvnc or X11 forwarding.
- skissane 5y ago
  It has always been predominantly a text-oriented platform but there has been some graphics support over the years. IBM ported their mainframe graphics package GDDM to the AS/400. I don’t think many people used it but it could be used for drawing charts. It required a special version of the physical 5250 terminal with graphics support. Standard 5250 terminal emulators don’t support the graphics extensions; IBM had a 5250 emulator with graphics support for MS-DOS; apparently they never ported it to Windows or anything else. GDDM saw more use on IBM mainframes. On mainframes it has 3D graphics support with PHIGS as the API. Several late 70s / early 80s high-end CAD systems (such as CADAM and CATIA) used GDDM, before moving off the mainframe on to Unix (and later, Windows and Linux). Don’t think the 3D part was ever ported to OS/400 though, I think GDDM/400 is 2D only. At one point (years ago) IBM was pushing a technology called RAWT (Remote AWT) which is basically Java AWT over RMI. I don’t think it is supported any more but older versions of the 400/i JVM included the RAWT JAR. 400/i also ships with a (deprecated) Java/XML based GUI framework called Graphical Toolkit - however, it is actually intended to run on client machines (primarily Windows), not the host. The AIX compatibility environment (PASE) includes X11 ported from AIX (and more recently IBM has made X.org X11 available as well, which is more modern than AIX X11). I believe the only local X server supported though is Xvnc; the operating system doesn’t support graphics cards.
Accujack 5y ago
We still have two of them in production, running old heavily regulated applications from decades past. If we loaded games on them, I doubt anyone would notice for a while. Honestly though, I've had to take care of these dinosaurs for so long I can't stand to look at them much less log in if I don't have to do it.

markphip 5y ago

You would be surprised. I worked for an AS/400 ISV and while the customers were all huge companies, the part of the company that ran an AS/400 was usually very small and had a lot of autonomy.