Star Trek 1971 Text Game (2008) • Hacker News Board

Re: Star Trek 1971 Text Game (2008)

#31

Post by JoeAltmaier » Wed, Apr 09, 2014, 1:15 PM UTC

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'.)

Re: Star Trek 1971 Text Game (2008)

#32

Post by Pxtl » Wed, Apr 09, 2014, 1:55 PM UTC

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

Re: Star Trek 1971 Text Game (2008)

#33

Post by fexl » Wed, Apr 09, 2014, 4:07 PM UTC

greenyoda wrote: post #16

butterfi wrote: post #10

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…

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 destroy…

Same here -- I played it in 1974 on an HP 2000F minicomputer via a teletype located in a converted janitor's closet at my high school.

The author mentions the lack of ability to renumber the lines in a BASIC program, but I'm quite sure there was a RENUM command that would do that.

In 1976 we got ADS (CRT) terminals in the computer lab, and once I figured out ESC-sequences, I had a shoot-em-up space ship game going. God I wish I still had the source code for that. :(

Re: Star Trek 1971 Text Game (2008)

#34

Post by salgernon » Wed, Apr 09, 2014, 5:06 PM UTC

salgernon wrote: post #18

aeberbach wrote: post #13

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 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 A…

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

good lord, typing without my glasses on the phone: s/sad instinct/interesting/g && s/colloidal/colossal/ig.

Re: Star Trek 1971 Text Game (2008)

#35

Post by Semiapies » Thu, Apr 10, 2014, 4:14 AM UTC

paulmd wrote: post #7

Semiapies wrote: post #2

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.

Going to take a wild guess that this is "Begin, A Tactical Starship Simulation" http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Begin_%28video_game%29

That absolutely looks like it, thanks!