Sinclair ZX80 / ZX81 / Z88 Forums

Back in the day (1977) most of our computers at work had a Star Trek game in it. Very crude text based machine. Here is a page that explains the game with some listings in BASIC. Has this simple version been run on a ZX81?

http://www.dunnington.u-net.com/public/startrek/

I did a search for Star Trek, I found nothing. So I went looking here and I see there is an updated version of the original with some graphics. Hmmmm!

I used to have David Ahl's BASIC computer games book, and I believe Star Trek was in there. I wish I still had it :¬/

C

The link I have posted has it in several versions at the bottom of the page. The guys at work used to run it on a Singer System 10. Cake Box Drives! I took the listing and keyed it into a VIC 20 with some success. I got the screen and I could fire. The SYSTEM 10 basic was a little different than the Vic 20 and sometimes the program would error and stop. I look around some more!

Click on the word HERE on this page for a version of Davids work. Thanks for the Name!

http://www.z80.eu/basic.html

You can read the book online here: The Zeddy does not have enough memory. My VIC was only 5K !

http://www.atariarchives.org/basicgames/

i took a crack at it on the zx80
1k is nowhere near enough ram

This piece of thread necromancy gives me an idea.

Starfire was an early Spectrum game, quite obviously based on Star Trek, and mostly written in BASIC because it was still acceptable to do so in 1982. If suitably cut down (colour, sound and UDGs go straight out the window and extraneous bumph can be lost), I reckon its 33.7K length could be cut in half and there's the bones of a ZX81 Star Trek game there.

But at the risk of sounding like a broken record, I'm running the Green Challenge on the CSSCGC, to recycle Spectrum games and down-convert them for the ZX81. I'm prepared to open the boundaries of that challenge, and here's an interesting one: Ronaprise USS 19-2020, from last year's competition, was a "guess what"-themed version of Star Trek... for the Z88. Given that the Z88 uses what I believe to be BBC BASIC (or very similar), might that also be a good starting point, if all the BBC-specific bits of the code were cut out?

Just a thought. Meanwhile, time for another update.

Yah, but keep in mind there are already various other versions...

See these topics:

Star Trek: Last Battle...

Super Star Trek

New old German game discovered

Mark

I looked at a few ZX81 Star Trek games recently and will have a video coming out in the fall (Btw, just did a few MCODER2 videos coming out this July, if anyone is interested, where I show how to did multi-part compiles of my Elite game -- https://www.youtube.com/c/8BitRetroJournal)

So these are the ones I looked at (there are likely a ton more):

• Enterprise - German game, really nice interface...I found it hard to play with type-in commands via INKEY$
• Last Battle - machine code game with awesome graphics...it jump to FAST a lot which caused me to keep losing context of what was happening
• by Macronics - cool visuals but buggy...galaxy map screws up game until you refresh (is there a better version out there)?
• Super Star Trek - haven't tried that one, I do have David Ahl's book so know it's a great game (but requires 32K)
• Bug Byte - this one is simple but pretty playable

I took Bug Byte and did an initial conversion to play on my (yet to be finished) ZXSimulator which still doesn't support floating point (I really need to get on that). I had to approximate a square root (not too bad) and a few RND calls which are easy to fix (similar to how MCODER2 does things, though I hacked ZXSimulator to give a random integer between 0 and less than N if you call it with RND*N). The trickiest fix was the INT(N/8) call since with negative numbers things are different when you have fractions, so a simple piece of code when from this:
... to this beast (there were many ways to write it but I went with execution efficient versus clarity):
I ended up making some other changes. Like now the Federation supply of energy is parceled out in thirds and the shield energy is also accounted for that. Torpedoes are also doled out proportional (if you don''t get the full 3000 units you don't get the full difference between what you have and 15). Plus a starbase now gives a low and critical low warning when Federation reserves get low. And at level one it used to put a Klingon in every quadrant, which I fixed to reduce that so you now have to hunt for them.

In any case, it plays really well both on an actual ZX81/TS1000 (i.e. best interface with little FAST screen jiggling) and on the ZXSimulator (which has no FAST mode). It's online if anyone wants to try it...just type LOAD "WIN1_TREK_BAS" and then type RUN.

http://zxsimulator.orgfree.com/

Or, if you want to play it yourself, here is the zip file containing the .p file (my converted one and the original starting one) and a BASIC in QL naming convention (i.e. using the underbar) since ZXSimlator is for the QL.


Star Trek was the first video game I ever played...on a TRS-80 Model 1 at a Radio Shack in my local mall when I was a kid. Wish I had one of these games on my ZX81 back then..unfortunately I didn't buy much software as a kid and I never recall seeing one advertised in the US through Gladstone Electronics. Still, nice to finally get to try them. If there are others, please post here (I did see one by Silversoft that has Romulans as the enemy and will need to track that down).