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Meanwhile I can't remember a commercial trek game that I actually felt inclined to play other than the coin-op one, which was similarly simple.

I believe the game you are looking for is called Conquest. It has of course been ported to Linux, and still is quite fun for multiplayer.

The patent covers Real's groundbreaking technology innovations dating back to November 1994, four months before the introduction of RealAudio, which forever changed the Web by bringing streaming audio to the Internet for the first time.

Not to be rude, as you may fool some younger Slashdotters, but not me. Fact is, there were streaming audio solutions on the Internet well before 1994. How do I know? Well, I took part in the development of one of them, and helped with the porting effort of several others.

I'll keep the list of examples short and sweet, others may add as they please.

AudioFile
The Network Audio System (NAS)

Note: These systems, as were several others, were OSS right from the start.

Esound requires too much manual fiddling to get working accross networked applications, while NAS was designed with exactly that in mind. NAS also happens to be supported out-of-the-box by several X terminal devices made by HP, NCD, etc.

umm... NAS?

Erm. How do you think things like xterms have sound? Solutions exist.

Yes, it makes far more sense to have the graphics system act as the server for audio as well, instead of another server. I mean, it's not like there are any networking audio servers out there.

Key features of the Network Audio System include:

• Device-independent audio over the network
• Lots of audio file and data formats
• Can store sounds in server for rapid replay
• Extensive mixing, separating, and manipulation of audio data
• Simultaneous use of audio devices by multiple applications
• Use by a growing number of ISVs
• Small size
• Free! No obnoxious licensing terms

• Festival - The Festival Speech Synthesis System.
• mpg123 - a command line MP3 player
• GAIM - a free AOL IM client
• OpenOffice (StarOffice) - the (now opensourced) StarOffice Suite has built-in NAS support for the Solaris and Linux Platforms.
• The Qt Library - from Trolltech supports NAS natively. You will need to pass the '-system-nas-sound' to './configure' before building.
• libSDL - SDL, the Simple DirectMedia Layer library, now has native NAS support thanks to Erik Inge Bols\x{00F8}
• XAnim - the X Animation viewer
• XBoing - a blockout type X game
• XPilot - a multiplayer client/server space warfare game
• Xemacs - the best cross-plaform, cross-language IDE
• Alsaplayer - A NAS Output plugin written by Erik Inge Bols\x{00F8} is now supplied with the Alsaplayer distribution.
• X MultiMedia System (XMMS). A NAS Output plugin written by Willem Monsuwe is available at ftp://ftp.stack.nl/pub/users/willem/
• Wine. A NAS plugin written by Nicolas Escuder is now available with the WINE distrubution.

It would be very interesting to see MAS compared with similar systems such as NAS and aRts...

Thanks for posting this. I never got into playing nettrek much, but did play original xtrek quite a bit. By the way, Conquest did eventually get ported to Unix in 1999, by Jon Trulson. I've played it, and it's a very close rendition of the VMS version. You can fetch it here.