
The empire game that was posted recently was fun, 
but got tiresome to use the same maps all the time.  
A bit of poking using adb revealed how maps are encoded; 
here's a program that converts an
ascii map to a coded version acceptable to empire.  It reads
the ascii map from standard input, and writes the coded
version to standard output.  Sample usage:

makmap <ascii.map >emp.map

Empire still requires that its input maps be named a.map or b.map,
so you will have to change the name of your object map accordingly.

Ascii input maps must be "on edge" (each line having 60 characters,
100 lines).  I arbitrarily set the city limit to 65 - a sample game
with 72 seemed to run very slowly, and possibly overwrote some
data structure somewhere (i dunno).

This program doesn't check for "cities on the edge".

Bill Stoll, ..!whuxlm!wws

