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 …
BBC BASIC ... DEF PROC
No more gosubs, procedures were the future.
But when it comes to type in listings, can't beat spending an hour typing in a listing on the ZX81 with 16k ram pack, only for the cat to come over, brush against the thing and the whole machine resets. In fact you just had to cough and it would do that.
Just a little FYI. The gosubs listed in the printout are not from the original game ala Mike Mayfield. Those were added later as an afterthought to control usage. The subroutine they refer to checked your credentials, time online, and time of day to see if you were using this program during authorized hours. I still have a copy of the original on paper tape and a printout neatly folded in a binder somewhere.
Why did nearly all magazine listings contain fatal errors in them? I remember many hours of fun trying to re-invent a missing line of code; "Your Computer" springs to mind as the worst offender. I even sent a short listing in myself once, got it published and, yes they managed to type it in wrong.
Remember this well from school days ... must have had the BASIC version on the school's Data General mini computer (someone had the Dave Ahl 101 Basic Games book and I certainly spent many hours either dictating or type these into a teletype!) but also remember when someone published a version that would run on our new fangled 6800 micro system in the electronics lab. This needed to be typed in as hex code to get it into the system and being a humungeously large program it wouldn't fit in the 1kB RAM on the processor eurocard so was a big rush to build a 4kB memort expansion eurocard to add to it!
"When I was at school we had to enter the bootstrap loader for the PDP-8/e using the toggle switches on the front."
God, I remember doing this and trying to peer at the funny LEDs which were behind some semi-opaque plastic and trying to get it all going in in the right order. Great fun those days.
Hex code? - thee were lucky!
When I was at school we had to enter the bootstrap loader for the PDP-8/e using the toggle switches on the front.
Don't worry, been there, done that (was a time at school when I knew the DG Nova bootstrap code from memory). And on a few occasions reinstalled RDOS starting with bootstrap load on swicthes followed by binary loader followed by several dozen boxes of fanfold tape and a chance to practice the skill of catching the tape coming through the tape reader (immensely high speed of 300bytes/sec!) so it re-fan-folded itself.
Ah yes. When I was at Poly, one of the better off lads had both a flat(!) and a new BBC model B(!!)
We went round mob-handed, to find that he had no games for it. A mag provided a listing for Star Trek for the beeb, comprising quite a number of full pages of very small type, and much midnight oil was burned typing it in (one reading, one typing, shift change every thirty minutes). We started at about 8pm and finished (including debugging all the typos) as the sun came up.
Played it a bit, lost interest when the pubs opened, so we asked for the cassette recorder to back it up. Yup, you got it, he didn't have one of those either.
Never have I heard so much invective directed at one person by so many.
herh I just remembered hours spent wandering around Chips looking through stacks and stacks of tapes and being amazed at how much time it saved over typing in code. The Aliens game for the speccy 128k was great fun! It took nearly as long to load from tape as it would have done to type it and failed half the time, but how freaking far have we come lol!
You haven't fully experienced the joy of Star Trek unless you've loaded the code from paper tape onto a venerable OS (MAXIMOP on the City of Birmingham treasury departmental mainframe) and then played on a teletype (with your own paper) in a converted school broom cupboard.
Now I think about it, having a direct connection from a school to the council finance system seems slightly suspect nowadays. It was a more innocent time.
I remember it well, although MAXIMOP was the upgraded system and it ran on an ICL1906. The first was indeed a HP2000. The changeover would have been somewhere in the mid to late seventies.
At least on a teletype you could look back at your last long-range scan and not have to do another -- because at ten characters a second, they took a significant time to produce.
Oh gosh. I remember playing this on my schools' dial-up connection to the local colleges' ICL 1903T at lunchtimes in 1975. And as for the UEA computing centre annexe on Friday evenings in 1976-79 when everybody was using up their weekly allowance of computer time... the introduction of VDUs saved an enormous amount of paper and was a lot quieter. As I recall, the UEA version had added black holes to randomly transport the Enterprise around the universe, and Romulans who were more numerous but a bit easier to destroy than Klingons.
Clearly you are the one responsible for the fact that the computer games industry died an ignominious death shortly thereafter and is but a distant memory to a few older readers.
The RIAA, MPAA, BSA and others will no doubt want to hold you to account for the fact that they're all living in penury.
/irony
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I wrote a Spectrum version in BASIC using a custom font for sprites. I had the numbered commands but incorporated the named quadrants and animations for the torps and phasers. I also included 3 dificulty modes that changed the size of the galaxy. I gave it away to everyone at school, in some cases as a swap for a copy of another game.
I have vague recollections of seeing a "Trek"-type game running on a schoolfriend's BBC Micro (the jammy goit) in the early-80s, but my main connection with this kind of game came a little later...
At uni in 1993, I inherited my first PC: a wheezy old DOS-running XT clone with an EGA colour monitor (don't ask me how that worked on an XT), which could just about get out of bed to run WordPerfect 5.1 and a couple of EGA-capable games. One of which (via a shareware floppy) was "EGATrek" - a very playable colour "Trek" clone, which I wasted enough hours on in my final year, that I felt honour-bound to send its author the $10 or so registration fee (and pre-Web/Paypal, I can't remember how I managed that).
Amazingly, you can still find EGATrek quite easily if you search around - I've got it loaded into DOSBox on my Arch Linux-running Eee 701 netbook, and I even fire it up every now and then for a ten-minute blast around the quadrant. Even began writing a "definitive guide" in my spare moments, until I realised I didn't have any...
Still hopeless at command levels 4 and 5, though. It's the "Mongol"'s plasma bolts.
I ported a version to my Oric-1 around 1983, from a listing printed from a Honeywell mainframe at a computing center where I had a summer job. Spent dozens of nights of typing and then debugging it, and finally made it update the display in place, instead of scrolling like my source version did (it was written for paper terminals). Also had to add some Oric BASIC curiosities like "PULL" just before the code jumped out of a FOR loop, otherwise its BASIC interpreter ran out of stack... Educational.
Before I did the porting, I had seen Apple Trek at my school, which two years earlier obtained an Apple II as their first computer. Part of my motivation was trying to recreate the game for the Oric. But not the same version shown in the article. In the one I saw, the opponents were "Klarnons", not Klingons, no doubt for trademark reasons.
dominated the attention of comp sci and electronics undergrads at a certain northern uni for a couple of weeks in the early 80s.
Cursor animations on a terminal driven by a DEC mainframe at 2400 baud - although you could piss everyone off by flicking the DIP switches at the back and turbo-ing your speed to 4800 baud, giving you an unfair advantage until the terminal controller crashed.
I have an old-fashioned paper photo of a terminal room with wall to wall Star Trek somewhere in the paper filing blob.
Then someone discovered that hacking the embryonic Internet was more fun...
Actually Paramount have been fairly open with fan-created content relating to Star Trek. As long as you don't sell it or do pornographic or offensive shit with it, they've been quite supportive of their fan base. If the fans put in enough effort, the Star Trek mob even get behind them on their independent projects - just look at The New Voyages and Phase II, both fan-made amateur spinoffs which ended up getting the backing of George Takei and Walter Koenig among other Star Trek notables. And there's the thousands of fansites and tons of fanart and fanfic out there that Paramount has always encouraged and never had a problem with.
Now if Star Trek was owned by Disney on the other hand...
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.
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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..
"Like most games of the period it was fun to play once or twice, but it lacked staying power."
Startrek on big ICL VME-B 29xx mainframes' terminals was popular with people working long hours on big projects in the 1970/80s. It provided a welcome mental diversion during break periods. The other two favourite games were "Zork" and "Moon Lander".
It was in Fortran. I spent many man-hours of work time turning it into a bootable Uniservo 16 tape so you could play it from the Uniscope 100 console while I was on nights.
I claim the biggest misuse of company money to implement Startrek. The official monthly rental for this configuration was over $200,000 per month.
1980 Atari 2600 Sears Exclusive
http://www.atariprotos.com/2600/software/stellartrack/stellartrack.htm
clocked more time on this 8 bit gem than on all the video games collected since that time - due to the 8 x 8 sector layout, as infinitely re-playable as Chess
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9suIxNT0GHw
"It'll never die, JIm!"
...back when they still did listings and hadn't abbreviated their title. Issue 5, March 1982, to be exact. This version was credited to one Lance Micklus, ran on a TRS-80 in 24kB (or 16kB if you left out the REM lines and disk I/O routines), and featured not only Klingon-killing but also exploration and planet surveying. 494 lines of BASIC. In fact, since the whole issue (and many more besides) is available on archive.org, here is the URL: http://archive.org/details/cvg-magazine-005
First computer game I ever played. On a TRS-80. One of mum's boyfriends, for reasons unknown to me at the time but quite clear now, was very keen for me to disappear off and play this game for hours.
I also fondly remember the 308-z and 480-z but can't recall every playing Star-Trek on them.
Good memories anyway. Probably one of the main reasons I really got into computers at an early age.
I remember coming across the code in a computer magazine and laboriously typing it all in only to find 8K was insufficient memory to store it and execute it. Had to do some modifying to reduce the size so there was enough memory left to allow execution - Aahh the joyful teenage days in front of a monochrome display, tape drive & keyboard built in - all hooked into a primitive processor with less capacity or capability than today's digital watches...
Artemis is an updated version per se. Each player with their own PC is assigned a station from Science officer to Engineering to Weapons and Comms. Yes there is a Captain's station too. But they don't actually have anything to do!
I managed to get a bunch of friends together to play this and it played out like the game scenarios people have been describing!
I believe the first multiplayer (turn based) trek game was called 'trek 7' - it was written in fortran for VMS by a student at the university of western ontario named Donald Ecclestone." - it was a fun game that could support multplayer games of up to 4 players (2 federation and 2 klingon). You could also play against computer generated enemies whose behaviour was based on that of their respective star trek episodes (i.e. gorn, orions). You could even fight moonbase alpha for fun!
it was pretty complex for a mainframe game in '79. You could lay mines, board ships, transfer power from engines to phasers and such. Incredibly engaging (especially for a little kid growing up in the department).
It was ported to run on open vms and linux on sourceforge. Check it out!
I got into programming in the first place
1979 in Perth... a bored school kid decides to book some time on the schools computer (read a vt50 dumb term with a 300 baud modem connect to the mainframe at Murdoch University) to play games. Being a bit of a trekkie even back then he picks the StarTrek game... and now 34 years later... I am a programmer.
Thinking back nostalgically... it's simple things like that that really influence people.
I went on to learn programming in basic (on cards) at my next high school and used to wander into Tandy Electronics stores and asked the salesmen if I could use the computer to program (I think that I sold more computers for Tandy than the actual salesmen did) saving my code onto the tape drives they used back then.
This article brings back some great memories about how I got hooked on computers. I was a high school senior in 72-73 and used to go out to a University's computer center, with some other young nerd friends. I thought submitting FORTRAN programs on punched cards was cool, but then one of the students let us play Star Trek on an Teletype KSR-33, connected to the University's CDC 6400. I was fascinated by the fact that you could create something that would interact in real-time with people. The next year when I was enrolled at the University, I drained the account for my first computing class playing this Star Trek game. I enjoyed playing Star Trek, but what I really wanted to know was how the game worked. Many thanks for this article.
The computer club at the school I went to had a Star Ttrek program running on a Wang 2200B written in BASIC running in real time. It was great. If you didn't move eventually all the klingons and Romulens would eneter your sector and attack you. Not a bad inteface for a 80 by 25 Character B/W screen. The machine had 8K of RAM and a 32K ROM based basic interpreter, twin tape drives and a card reader. Nice keyboard though, with smart function keys.
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