I decided to play around with Shippy 1984 last night. The game's website was gone or so I thought. I eventually found it. The version in Fedora in 1.3.3.7. It has some patches and creates an SDL1 and allegro packages. The version on the website is 1.4.1. It only supports allegro5. It also uses his IGame.h file which I presume he uses in multiple games. It requires lua but that is not used in Shippy 1984. It also has code for other things like tile mapping which have nothing to do with Shippy 1984. I don't think there is any gameplay changes in the new version.
I ported 1.3.3.7 to SDL2. Now what do I do? Porting 1.4.1 is significant work with no real benefit. If I fork and release my own version do I name it 1.3.3.8? What if I add new features not found in 1.4.1? If I rename the program I'd have to redo the title screen. One possibility is to rename it to Shippy 1984 C (or something similar) because it is C and the latest version is technically C++. (It is largely the same C code with lots of global variables but there is the IGame class.) But what if I decide to refactor it into C++? I could also punt the issue by given the patches to Fedora and not bother with a release but that's not really my preference.
I have sent an email to the author. Obviously if he says I can't use the Shippy 1984 name, this discussion is kinda moot.