Star Trek: The original computer game Ah, the simple pleasures of the earliest computer games - and you don’t get much earlier than 1971. As Star Trek: Into Darkness warps onto UK cinema screens this weekend, we look back at not only the first attempt to bring the franchise to computer screens, but what was arguably one of the most popular, certainly the most …
In 1981/2 we had a 6800-based Perkin Elmer 3500 datastation with hi-res monochorome graphics card at work. It came with several 'unofficial' games, one of which was Star Trek.
The disappointing thing about the game was the number of times the ship broke down, so I tinkered with the program to make the ship start with a realisitc health level of 1 (and no more) per system instead of a borderline flaky 0.
For some reason, whoever wrote our version decided that the ship's weapons, warp drive, etc, were continuously repaired, even beyond 100% functionality. However, their starting level of 0 meant that the random fault generator could render the game 'over' after your first warp into Klingon territory.
1) Download RiscOS image for the Raspberry Pi (with BBC BASIC)
2) Type* in a whole lot of game listings harvested from game magazines of yesteryear
3) Post image of legacy game machine online
4) ...
5) Profit.
*By type I mean pay someone else, children for example, to type or perhaps debug the OCR output.
Blimey, this brought back memories.
In my first real job after graduating, I remember playing this on Intel MDS-80 development systems. I'm not sure if anyone remembers these, but they were hideously expensive (but rather useful) workstations, targeted for embedded development on Intel 8080 family chips.
I can still hear the "chunka-chunka" sound of the enormous 8-inch floppy drive loading up the game.
http://www.computinghistory.org.uk/det/731/Intel-MDS-80-Microcomputer-Development-System/
I worked for an oil exploration company in 1980 as a summer job, whilst still at school. They had the Fortran version on the VMS 11/780 machines. That and the IM "phone" utility are what got into computing. There is nothing new in this world. ;-)
I played dungeon on CP/M and Apple, when I worked as a computer repairman after school in '82.
I download the BSD games on Linux as one of the first packages after a new install...
Not even near. When I read that part of the ancestry of Star Trek was a game called Space Wars, it reminded me that I'd read about an earlier game with a similar name. It seems that Spacewar! is no relation to Star Trek, but it's much, much earlier.
According to a "reliable source", Spacewar! was written in 1962, on a PDP-1 (I never knew there was such a computer, though it makes sense that DEC didn't start from number 8. Were there ever PDPs 2-7?)
While I'm writing, is "numberical" a word you made up?
" I have a terminal session stuck in a "Twisty maze of passages all alike" here on OSX, hints anyone ? "
Sounds like you're trying to debug a medium-sized Java application that has a delegate chain longer and more convoluted than the European Commission.
Control-C and re-write it in Intercal - it'll be quicker in the long run.
I have a terminal session stuck in a "Twisty maze of passages all alike" here on OSX, hints anyone ?
It took me months to realise that each of the wordings of the twisty passages were slghtly different depending on which node you were in in the maze.
Dungeon/Colossal Cave was sadly responsible for the obligitory maze in eveyr adventure game; even Myst. Grrr!!
On an IBM mainframe under VM/CMS using a version created in 1975. I have 4 slightly different versions on this (obviously work) machine. I believe these are written in IBM/370 assembler. Downloadable (with other VM/CMS games) from http://zvm.sru.edu/~DOWNLOAD/GAMES.VMARC.
But in my case, the Star Trek game was as on a terminal inside a major insurance company's head office (my mother's place of employment) while waiting for a lift home from school.
A year or so back, while discussing programming on early computers, my friend uncovered from his stash a book (whose name escapes me) on programming a Star Trek like space combat simulation (it went as close as it could without mentioning that TV series). Lot on the meta-programming of the simulation; it made the Star Fleet Battles board game look like a highly abstracted system.
Hah! That is the game I first played and loved in 1981 on a TRS-80 Model 1 (the one with the 32k RAM expansion you could beat someone to death with). I have often credited this game (and hacking it's internals) with setting me on course for a stellar career in software development. More lately I've been cursing it's name for setting me on course for a unrewarding two and a half decades listening to idiots explain why doing a slovenly, half-assed job is in whichever business' best interests at the time
That icon is a pint of bitter, right?
My first experience of a computer was playing this on a Sharp MZ80K in late 81 which one of our lecturers owned. Over the years I tried many other versions but always compared them (poorly) to that articular one
It had truly annoying music and we where told that it could not be removed as the program was written in machine code.
Needless to say after being told that it couldn't be done, sparked my interest in taking other peoples code apart, though sadly this was not one of the targets (as it took me over a year to get my first machine.)
Possibly I should hunt out a sharp emulator and finish the job.
Star Raiders on the Atari 400/800 was the thing to have - I remember being quite blown away at the time (1980?). Amazng execution of the Star Wars gameplay, with a sort of 3d-ish cockpit view allowing you to blast the baddies in person. There was a cool star field effect, and a Star Wars-esque hyperspace effect as you moved from sector to sector on the Galactic Map.
Awesome stuff at the time.
Star Raiders was a decent commercial stab at making an all-action version of the Star Trek game but was very different in character. You had photon torpedos but not phasers and generally you knew exactly where the klingons were. Consequently It lacked the tension and strategy of the original in favour of greater accessibility to the arcade generation. Still, it gave me a real thrill the first time I made Star Commander Class 1
I played this at UEA on a 1903 running GEORGE-3 using one of three Tectronix VDUs (the computer centre was mainly Teletypes in those days).
In that environment the Job Description steering lines had been set up so that when you hit BREAK IN to drop out of the game the wretched program would intercept the command and declare ANTIMATTER PODS EXPLODE DUE TO BREAK IN - CONDITION PURPLE, locking you in for the duration. (SWON BITS BREA as I recall, but it has been 36 years).
A plan formed.
Everyone had a limited budget for online computer use, but should the mainframe be taken down while you were "working" your budget for the session would not be tallied, presumably because you had lost the work you were doing.
So.
Start game late at night after work finished, kill all enemies, press BREAK IN and let game idle itself into the maintenance window.
Worked like a charm.
I remember playing this on an early HP-3000 at my university when I was just a little kid, it must have been around 1973. I was pleased to see it was available on the Processor Tech SOL-20 computer I built from a kit in 1975. It was known as TREK-80, since it was ported to assembly language on the Intel 8080A processor. I remember being quite pleased to read in the manual that you could put a radio next to the computer, tune it to an empty channel, and the radio interference from the CPU would be picked up to make phaser sounds.
Here's a scan of the old TREK-80 manual, with a screen cap (a photo of the CRT screen).
http://www.dunnington.u-net.com/public/startrek/trk80.pdf
But I'm sure that wasn't the first computer game I ever played. I recall playing MoonWar on the PLATO IV system, long before the university got their HP-3000.
This post has been deleted by its author
This post has been deleted by its author
I played trek in 1976 via a teletype on an IBM system at Exeter University's computer science department. The only bit I can remember now is where the game would suddenly announce "Yeoman Rand has spilled coffee on the command console" and dump you somewhere new. It may sound crap now but it was way better than "lunar lander" on a teletype.
Yup, this game was essentially my introduction to computing. My high school had two Teletypes and one CRT which were acoustically connected to the neighboring town’s high school’s HP 2000; it was much easier to get time on one of the Teletypes, since the CRT was practically the private reserve of the head of the computer club. In my case, the game (in HP BASIC) was called UFO, and it had the retreatable Klingons. I’m fairly sure that I’ve still got a paper tape listing of this game up in my attic. … Misty water-colored memories …
1981 on a System /34.. Used to print out a certificate when you finished.. Something like .. "Congratulations Captain Kirk you have killed <Random Number> of Klingons with an efficiency rating of NN."
Unless you were killed - when the certificate was quite abusive as I remember.
The competition to get your efficiency rating high was immense..
The Register 
Biting the hand that feeds IT
Copyright. All rights reserved © 1998–2024
