It started with a conversation in a pub (don’t most things?) related to porting “old” code to newer languages. With my interest in TinyMud I decided to take on the challenge of porting the original c-code to Ruby.

This is now becoming an intense labour of love! I’m wrapping the old TinyMud code as Ruby extensions and writing as many test cases as I can. I’m over half way through now. The idea being to get good test coverage of the c-code (in Ruby) then switch to Ruby equivalent code - Then re-factor to a more Ruby’esque style.

I have to say I’m impressed by the original source code (although I’m finding some edge case defects). I wonder if the Ruby code will be any more compact? Intending to put the result on GitHub at some point - For now it’s a one man mission!

Once complete I will run this on a server and prove wikipedia (sort of) wrong, I quote “No active games currently run on a TinyMUD server”. I could host the original (and I’m in a position to), but I think running a modernised equivalent would be more interesting.