Star Trek game for the TRS-80

fuelish

I used to play this at the local Radio Shack when I was a kid. It was on the TRS-80, monochrome screen, loaded using a cassette player. It was pretty fun. You defended free space from the Romulans, repaired at space stations, and explored.
Does anyone even know what I am talking about? I want to play it again.

Silvoculous

I think I've played it too. Were the difficulty levels determined by military ranks? (i.e. Cadet is the lowest difficulty, Admiral is the highest)

I can see that game in my head, but the exact name escapes me as well.

Tw4win

Not sure. However, I do remember a text based Trek game. Anyone know the one I'm talking about?

fuelish

Silvoculous wrote: »

I think I've played it too. Were the difficulty levels determined by military ranks? (i.e. Cadet is the lowest difficulty, Admiral is the highest)

I can see that game in my head, but the exact name escapes me as well.

I don't remember that, but I don't remember much from thirty years ago. I do remember it being based on a 10x10 grid for quadrants of space with a 10x10 grid in each sector. All the screen characters were text based, the Enterprise was something like:
_
_>-O Edit: This might have been the Romulan ship.

Shadowfire

Tw4win wrote: »

Not sure. However, I do remember a text based Trek game. Anyone know the one I'm talking about?

Are we talking about the one with the map, and all ASCII characters? Because if so, I played that game for unhealthy amounts of time...

Tw4win

Shadowfire wrote: »

Tw4win wrote: »

Not sure. However, I do remember a text based Trek game. Anyone know the one I'm talking about?

Are we talking about the one with the map, and all ASCII characters? Because if so, I played that game for unhealthy amounts of time...

No, this was totally text, if I remember correctly but it was fairly complex.

Ahh...here it is. The Kobayashi Alternative

Saddler

Fuelish, your game sounds like a port of Sega's Star Trek Strategic Operations Simulator.

Mordrack

I don't recall there being a TRS-80 version of that one, Saddler. I imagine he's probably thinking of Star Trek, though it lacks Romulans. I don't remember any of the Trek games of that era having Romulans.

fuelish

That is it. It was Klingons not Romulans. My laptop did not want to load up the TRS-80 version, I seem to lack applets, need to pick some up.

El Guaco

Wow, that was a time warp to my childhood. I didn't have the TRS-80, but some family friends did, and whenever we would go over for dinner, I would beg to play that game.

fuelish

Yep. I was eleven or twelve and there was a Radio Shack in the mall down the road. The manager payed me a buck a day to sweep up and then I could goof off on the computers or we would race the RC cars in the store.

Binary

Saddler wrote: »

Fuelish, your game sounds like a port of Sega's Star Trek Strategic Operations Simulator.

I logged stupid amounts of time on that game on the Atari 5200. Back when I was like SIX.

bigpants

I stumbled across this dead thread and thought I'd respond anyways.

I'm pretty sure the TRS-80 game was called 1980's "Space Warp"
It was definitely for sale at Radio Shack stores (that's where I bought mine).
Unlike other Star Trek text adventures, it was real time.
It was originally called "Time Trek", and used Star Trek lingo,
but when Radio Shack started selling it they changed all the names.
i.e. The Enterprise became the Endever

http://www.mobygames.com/game/trs-80/space-warp
There are screen shots!
http://www.classiccmp.org/cpmarchives/trs80/mirrors/pilot.ucdavis.edu/davidk/documentation/26-1912.htm

Even better... YOU CAN PLAY IT IN YOUR BROWSER RIGHT HERE!
http://people.cs.ubc.ca/~pphillip/trs80.html
Controls
Arrow Keys - Move
1 - 9 What you want to do (long range scan, phasers)

Feel free to watch my GDC 2012 presentation about the TRS-80 (including Time Trek)
http://www.gdcvault.com/play/1015922/Inspiration-from-the-Trash-The

Constrictor

I grew up on the TRS-80 Model I with cassette tape drive. This takes me waayyyyy back.

rbledsaw3

fuelish wrote: »

I used to play this at the local Radio Shack when I was a kid. It was on the TRS-80, monochrome screen, loaded using a cassette player. It was pretty fun. You defended free space from the Romulans, repaired at space stations, and explored.
Does anyone even know what I am talking about? I want to play it again.

You may be referring to a game my grandfather's company Judges Guild came out with in 1979 called Trek-80. It was the first computer game licensed by Gene Roddenberry.

acaeum.com/jg/Item0100.html

RoyceSraphim

What was the star trek fan game that was C&D'ed but had you touring the quadrent, evacuating planets and visiting bases?
Begin 2
Nooooo! I was thinking of Rescue.

StarTrek-TRS-77-78

The earliest TRS-80 Star Trek that I am aware of is the one that I wrote during Winter 1977-78 for the 16K Level One TRS-80. I gave it away at the TRS-80 Users' Group in Kansas City in Early 1978 and gave it to Radio Shack managers at the Radio Shack District Meetings held in April 1978, which the Regional Manager had invited me to visit so that they would know that a TRS-80 programmer was available in their area.

All the while, I was adding improvements, which often meant needing to optimize code so that it would take less memory, making room for new ideas. I loosely based it on the teletype version of Star Trek that was published in the book What Do You Do After You Press Return. It took a lot of work because the TRS-80 only had 26 numeric variables (A-Z), two strings (A$, B$), one numeric array { A(1) etc. }. I changed the aiming and navigation computer to use the more logical 0 to 360 degrees for movement and torpedoes (instead of the crazy (1 to 9). I made it possible to blow up your own Star Base (Spock had a pithy comment if you did it, whether by accident or deliberately), and added the Corbomite Maneuver, which could backfire on the player if used recklessly. Why? Because if successful, all Klingons fled to different random quadrants, even quadrants you had already mapped (but without updating your records, so you had to map them all over again). If you used the Emergency Transporter to try to escape a tough quadrant, there was a chance you might come back as Richard Nixon.

I used single characters to represent the quadrant, with E, K, B and * to represent the Enterprise, any Klingons, a star base, and stars. By crunching the space, I was able to permanently display a long range scan with three digit numbers, 217 represented 2 Klingons, 1 star base and 7 stars in one quadrant. The right hand of the screen partially scrolled, but to save memory it just went until it reached the bottom then started again from the top. 'GOTO775' was my redraw screen command.

When I ran The Software Center in St Louis (Florissant), someone tried to sell my own program to me, but after I demonstrated that I knew the program better than he did, and broke into the program and redrew the screen with GOTO 775. He asked what I was doing, and I replied, "Well ____, when I wrote this program two years ago, I set up line 775 as my redraw screen command." His face went white. He had no idea he was trying to sell it to the author. He never tried to sell me any other programs.

I wish I still had a listing of my program, but many boxes of my business papers were destroyed in 2013, darn my sister's cleanliness gig while I was unavailable to protect my stuff.

Writing it was a fun process. I heard from salesmen and customers all over the country who had the program. I only sold one copy. Those were the days. I kind of miss the old BASIC languages.

Space Pickle

My favourite was always VGA Trek.

Helium5793

Time trek was the name of the game. It was written in assembler for the TRS-80 Model 1. It came on a cassette (yeah, they would load machine code too), and was a great game. It was fast, and had a bunch of quadrants where you would search and kill aliens. Perhaps the best parts was you could be sitting in an empty quadrant, and enemies would warp in and attack you. A lot of times after a battle with 2 or 3 you would be waiting for your systems to charge, and another alien would show up. Sometimes you died, sometimes you were able to warp out to another quadrant to save yourself. The original author above is right. It was a very good game.