
Star Trek 1971 Text Game (2008) - deanmen
http://www.codeproject.com/Articles/28228/Star-Trek-Text-Game
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butterfi
This is the first computer game I ever played. My mom was a secretary at a
local university, and there was a computer lab across the hall from her
office. I'd go there after school to wait for a ride home, and someone logged
me in and set me on my way. This was all on paper-feed terminals and I'd take
the stack of printout homes and read through each game over and over. This is
when I fell in love with computers.

In the early nineties I decided to learn about unix, and this was the first
game I played after setting my first BSD box up. This is when I fell in love
with unix.

Thanks for the game, to the original programmer(s) to all the people who have
kept it alive. This program is special to me.

~~~
greenyoda
This was also the first computer game I ever played! It was on an HP 2000
computer running timeshared BASIC from a clunky teletype, in the early 1970s.
The best part was that you could just type "LIST" and it would print out all
the BASIC code - all the games on that machine were open source!

If the Klingons beat you, you'd get this disheartening message, which I
remember to this day: "The Enterprise has been destroyed. The Federation will
be conquered. You are dead."

I also remember playing a car racing game on the same machine, and also a game
about landing a spaceship on the moon (which, a few years later, I created a
real-time version of on a 6800 microprocessor in machine language). But the
Star Trek game was definitely the best one.

~~~
Shivetya
I remember all three, my father used to leave me at the console when he would
take me to work on the weekends at IBM. Not sure that was system 3 or not.

Between that and reams of green bar to use at home for "artwork" I found my
fascination with computers. Didn't hurt we had first generation IBM PCs and
before then my father had about everything heath kit put out.

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DanielBMarkham
Looking at this source code brings back memories. Star Trek was ported
everywhere there was a BASIC.

When I was 16, in 1981, our school got it's first computer, a Commodore Pet.
4K of RAM! Basic! Hi-tech graphics on the keys!

We only had one, it was in the library, and you had to 1) sign up for it, and
2) get a pass to leave study hall to come to the library.

My math teacher was an easy touch, so I scored a pass every day to go to the
library. Unfortunately, other students also wanted to use the computer, and
there was quite a bit of hijinks involved with actually making it happen
(Hint: never sign up in pencil).

I learned how to code going through the Star Trek game and figuring out how it
worked.

As a side note, my nemesis at the time was Roland. So I spent the formative
years of my programming life creating a game called "Kill Roland" in Pet
Basic. It was mostly Space Invaders, with a little bit of Star Trek thrown in.
Little Rolands ("R"s) would come down from the top of the screen, you would
use the arrow keys to move your guy around at the bottom, and the space bar
launched missiles. There were smart missiles, that you could control after
firing, heat seekers, and so on. Of course, the Rolands just kept coming, more
and more of them (at times splitting in 2)

All the other kids at the library loved that game. Roland, not so much.

Fun times. I'd love to play Star Trek in BASIC again. (Zork would be a close
second)

~~~
pgrote
You are so right about the memories. We played a version of this on a
teletype. A game would take a box of paper in the library. lol

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aeberbach
If you like this kind of thing, try to find copies of books by Dave Ahl - see
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BASIC_Computer_Games](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BASIC_Computer_Games)

I like this kind of thing and I have both books. A family friend CP/M system
was by first gaming experience and I played all of them. The Star Trek here
exists in a sort of copyright limbo, CBS obviously didn't license it but it
was too popular to squash. I remember seeing ports of this to Amiga, Palm
Pilot and Windows CE over the years.

Colossal Cave is a contemporary - it wasn't distributed as source (to my
recollection... compiled OBASIC.COM IIRC?) so it isn't in the books but it was
my favourite.

~~~
salgernon
I've actually been re-reading some of the "best of creative computing" books
published by ahl. It is really sad instinct to see how the future was largely
predicted.

As far as colloidal caves, you should check out The "get lamp" documentary.

[http://www.getlamp.com](http://www.getlamp.com)

~~~
aeberbach
I was a backer on that one, it's a great documentary.

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_xo_
If you want to try a version of Star Trek in your browser (ztrek) -
[http://z-machine.lilawelt.de/game/ztrek/play/](http://z-machine.lilawelt.de/game/ztrek/play/)

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ryandrake
I remember transcribing this onto a Commodore 64 line-by line from an issue of
_Creative Computing_. And at the end of the day it worked!

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JoeAltmaier
My favorite: Begin, a Tactical Star Trek Simulation. Its like this game but on
steroids. Vast galaxy, a whole fleet in combat on each side, Klingons and
Romulans and Orions, many vessel classes! Google it, its everywhere, even
Wikipedia.

And I know the guy who wrote it, in fact I still work with him. Tom Nelson,
who can craft code like a work of art.

If you like playing these games, I definitely suggest giving Begin a try.

(Why 'Begin'? Because in the progenitor to this game, in BASIC, on an HP2000
there was a maximum code size. Large programs had to be written in pieces and
'chained' together in modules. The modules were numbered but the first was
called 'Begin'.)

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Semiapies
I remember a rather similar DOS game with an ASCII display (and probably a
decade younger in coding) that was a turn-based fleet battle between whichever
two sides (of Federation, Klingon, Romulan, or Orion) and relative ship
numbers per side you liked. For some reason, the executable was called
"begin.exe".

Pity I lost track of the disk.

~~~
paulmd
Going to take a wild guess that this is "Begin, A Tactical Starship
Simulation"

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Begin_%28video_game%29](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Begin_%28video_game%29)

~~~
Semiapies
That absolutely looks like it, thanks!

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lewispollard
> This is an artifact of BASIC. It doesn’t really have an effect in C#. In
> BASIC, just as in C#, the randomizer could have been initialized based off
> the system time. If that was not an option, they should have taken advantage
> of the instructions prompt.

User inputted seeds were in a lot of classic text based, randomly generated
games - by sharing the seed with friends, you could play through exactly the
same game and see who did it better. Multiplayer!

~~~
thristian
I like how he blindly assumes that there _was_ a "system time", or that there
was a way to asynchronously poll for keyboard input. At least on the Apple II
I grew up with, timekeeping required third-party hardware, and the only way to
get user-input without writing assembly was INPUT, which paused the program
until the user typed something and hit Return.

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xenophonf
Good ol' trek was the very first video game I played on the family computer!
This was a IMS 5000SX running TurboDOS 1.2, some time in 1983 I think. (Why my
father saw fit to buy this thing instead of an Apple II is a question for
another day. The best the IMS could do was drive a text-only WYSE-50 terminal
at maybe 19200 baud.) Later on, my cousin would dial me into his 3B2 (using
Tymnet or Telenet!) so I could play a full-screen variant called "vtrek". I
found the vtrek sources on an FTP archive several years ago, but it requires
BSD 4.3-style termios, and I just don't have it in me to port it to curses or
something more modern.

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Zardoz84
I don't know that this game was an ASCII game. The first time that I saw it
was the MS-DOS versions egatrek and vgatrek.

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dghf
I played this on an ICL One Per Desk
([http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One_Per_Desk](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One_Per_Desk)),
sometime in the mid-80s. I loved it.

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spikexxx
I learned to program typing this into the mainframe at the college where my
dad worked and then fiddling with the code to see what happen. I still learn
that way.

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cpayne
What is the modern day equivalent to this? So many have commented that this
was their first (and mine too!) exposure to computers. Something in php?
Rails?

~~~
fit2rule
Minecraft. Unreal engine modding. And so on ..

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Pxtl
Oh, that's neat... I assume this was the predecessor to EGATrek?

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t3hSpork
I have played ATS a Trek MUSH: telnet ats.trekmush.org 1701

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flares
How to play this game? .. i downloaded the source but cannot run it..? is
there any interface that i require?

~~~
pacaro
I would assume that csc.exe will compile it on windows, otherwise you will
need to install mono

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fredgrott
this had a different name on commodore computers with graphics but same exact
play and screens

