Trek Game

Many early computer systems had a game called "Star Trek", "Trek", or something similar. It was a text-based game where the player was the commander of the Enterprise (or a ship with a different name to avoid trademark issues) and had to destroy a fleet of Klingons or Romulans (or some non-trademark-infringing alien society).xxx

The game field was divided into sectors. One could get a short-range scan of objects in one's sector, use impulse drive to maneuver, and use weapons against enemy ships. One used warp drive to move to other sectors.

Some sectors contained starbases, where the player's ship could repair, refuel, and reload.

A lot of variations existed. These days, many people are familiar with the 'trek' program that is bundled with most Linux and BSD distributions.

Home computer variations include StarRaiders, which added real-time arcade gameplay to the standard sector-based strategy format. There was also an Atari 2600 version called Stellar Track, which, surprisingly, was a more direct port of the text-based version.

The BSD Unix version was first written in 1976 by Eric Allman, well known author of Sendmail.

History of trek games: http://www.dunnington.u-net.com/public/startrek/

Super Star Trek -- derived from 1970s era CDC mainframe game, translated and ported to some modern systems: http://almy.us/sst.html

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Star_Trek_(text_game)

Oh, yeah... I played this a lot as a kid on my friend's IMSAI. My dad taught me a bit about trig in order to move and fire torpedos (it used polar coordinates: mapping 1-9 to 0-360 degrees). I recall trying to reverse engineer the BASIC SpaghettiCode [shiver].

While at the UniversityOfWyoming? in the mid 70s, I played this game (ascii graphics of course, no CRTs, just teletype paper!) written in BASIC. I no longer have a printout of the game (wish I did), just a paper tape copy... and it's a little hard to find a PT reader these days. Anyone who remembers this game ca 1974 and has the source code, I'd love a copy. -- RonJandrasi

Hi, Ron. If the old StarTrek game you mentioned was written in BASIC, the punch tape probably contains the source code itself. I used to read punch tapes with my eyeballs back in 1973. If I had a tape lying around now, I'd tell you how to do it. (My old tapes, if they still exist, are probably in my mother's basement over 1000 miles away!) First of all, are there printed characters next to the holes? If so, you're in luck. Just start reading, pointy end first. :-) If not, the holes are punched in a code you will need to decipher. Whatever the code is, I remember it being pretty simple. Is there room for just 7 holes in one row? Then each row very likely contains the ASCII code for each character in the program source code. That's all I can come up with for now... -- ElizabethWiethoff

[The Teletypes I'm familar with using punched 8-bit ASCII on the tapes. -- JeffGrigg] See http://www.midatlanticretro.org/PDP/Videos.htm

The 1970s-era Unix Star Trek by Eric Allman is available with or even shipped with many Linux and BSD distributions these days. E.g. on my SuSE linux box, it's preinstalled and can be invoked via "trek" on the command line. Just the thing for nostalgia with low effort. -- DougMerritt

Doug, thanks for the links. The Mike Mayfield STTR1 is it as far as I recall.. even the name STTR1 sounds right. --Ron

Good news, but I'd still like to remember how to read punch tapes! :-) -- Eliz

See: PaperTape for old media discussion...

The Star Trek game, running on some guy's 8-bit hand built home computer is what got me into computers in 1976. I then "wasted" paper and weekends at a teletype, playing the game and learning to program from my peers. Yep, one of these teletypes: -- JeffGrigg

CategoryGame