We’re building a public timeline of the early BASIC versions of the Star Trek text game, from Mike Mayfield’s 1971 Sigma 7 game through the mid-1980s micro ports, as part of research into how those games led to DECWAR at UT Austin:
It has 34 versions, each with a note on where it is believed to come from, how it differs, and how firm that evidence is. We have attempted to get 26 of the games running in the browser, with the original code beside them, and they may run. This is a first attempt, so there are certainly mistakes in the history, and some games may not behave as they did on the original machines.
We’d be grateful for help with:
The history: are the lineage notes and dates right? Do you know of versions we haven’t found?
Missing pieces: Mayfield’s original 1971 and 1972 code, the “Penn.” program named in UT-Trek’s header, the longer UT-Trek that David Matuszek remembers, the programs TREK0.A100, FUKCO0 and the full four-terminal YTREK, and any source for WAR, the two-player game before DECWAR.
Documentation: manuals for TAURUS BASIC, Sol-20 Extended Cassette BASIC and Intellec MDS BASIC. We inferred each dialect from the listings alone, so some behavior is guesswork.
Bugs: anything that plays or draws differently from what you remember, with line numbers if you have them.
Just reply to this post with corrections, sources, memories or scans, however small. Tell us if you’d like credit and how you’d like to be named.
Do you know if any versions of Star Trek was restricted to 8 way aiming or movement? I think Seabat in More BASIC computer games was restricted to 8 way aiming and movement, which makes things different in interesting ways.
Have you talked to the TrekCore people. They’ve been on a mission to record every star trek game ever created and they claim to be at 290 ?
A load of the PET implementations are archived at https://www.commodoregames.net. 19 with obvious trek names, don’t know how many others. It’s missing 3D Startrek at least.
I need to have a rummage as I think there’s a Star Trek heavily expanded game in one of the old computer mags here I noticed recently including beaming down to plants, mining dilithium crystals etc and I meant to check it was on the Trekcore list.
Obviously they can’t record every star trek game ever created, because a lot of them will not have “broken containment”. My first one only exists on some tape, if at all. It definitely never broke containment, because I didn’t know anyone else with a Datasette (only floppies). My second one almost certainly never broke containment.
Neither of those were any good. The first one took five minutes per turn, because I did things in a ridiculously inefficient way. The second abandoned having any sort of map in each sector, because I hadn’t yet understood how to do that in a vaguely efficient way (really pathetic on my part).
I don’t remember exactly. I think we got a C64 in 1984, but it might have been 1983. I remember the price was $300 if that helps narrow it down.
Initially, I just had the Datasette which I had been using with the VIC-20, but we got a 1541 when it was also $300. That was when we could finally get and play games that everyone else was pirating left and right. (We never saw any tape software for sale - not for any platform.)
The second one, though … no idea when I programmed that one.
In retrospect, I wish I had tried programming a Star Trek on the VIC-20.
At the time, I had only ever played Star Trek on TRS-80 Model 3 (although not Trek-80 - the version I played required Short Range Scan to even see the local map). I wasn’t sure how many columns the TRS-80 had, so I just assumed Star Trek required maybe 80 columns.
In fact, the TRS-80 had 64 columns, and the classic version of Star Trek only required 40 I think.
So I just thought it was impossible for the VIC-20.
But the big thing I didn’t realize was that the sector map was really only 8x8 (or maybe 10x10) in size. If I understood that, I would have realized the VIC-20 actually had enough columns.
In 1977, I went off to college. They had a PDP-10. I played two games on it.
One was adventure (ADVENT)
The other was a Star Trek type game called either TREK or DECTREK. It was an advanced version in which the Klingons continued to move and attack while it was awaiting player command input.
The following summer, the PDP was replaced by a VAX but I was too busy to play any games on it.
Also in 1977, Technical Systems Consultants (TSC) published their trek style game, Space Voyage. As it was written in assembly language instead of BASIC, it only needed 4K of RAM to run which made it quite popular. It was available for the 6800 microprocessor and supposedly also the 8080 though I have never been able to find that version.
The Apple II Integer Basic one (mentioned in those pages) was the first one I played and probably because of that, my favourite. It encompassed just about all I wanted and was playable in a reasonable amount of time.
I’ve long thought about writing my own, but it would probably be based on that one because - why not. I do have my own TinyBasic system though, so getting the existing TB version going might be fun, but I also have sketched out ideas about a bigger one for it - my TB supports a chain command and up to 6 stored programs on my minimal platform which preserves variables and spare RAM, so it might be possible - but then you may question my sanity in trying to do this when there are easier ways forward. Ah well.
As for the year - 1978 for the Apple II version. My retro minimal 6507 cpu TinyBasic system is slightly more modern - as in now and the past few years..
@IsaacKuo Possibly the first computer games I ever saw were WUMPUS and a Star Trek game that limited firing “compass directions” to 8, just like you asked about. I believe these ran on an HP-2000 time sharing system. Almost certainly written in HP BASIC.
The amount of work writing a Star Trek depends on how much you care to simplify it. When I played Star Trek on the TRS-80 I didn’t entirely understand it nor did I study its details very carefully.
So, when I decided to write my own, it was with fuzzy memories and misunderstandings.
My first attempt was disastrously inefficient, as I stored everything in a sector in huge 2D arrays and my code scanned the entire sector to see what was in a cell to “move” it. (The overwhelming majority of the cells were blank so this was horribly inefficient.)
My second attempt, I just threw my hands up in the air and didn’t have a sector map at all. Instead there was just a small array of up to 4 enemy Klingon ships. You just attacked them one at a time.
Now that honestly wasn’t very complex to write and it still managed to be fun. Which actually surprised me.
I was unaware of the existence of the 1971 script game, so I’m pleasantly surprised that others took that sort of idea further.
