I see that Ken Simms is not mentioned on this page as a developer of
the Star Trek game, and this indicates that someone named Mike
Mayfield developed it in BASIC in 1971. Is it the case that Ken Simms
implemented someone else's game or did he create something with no
knowledge of the existing BASIC Star Trek game, or is the wiki info
incorrect? My prior understanding was that he was the original
developer of the text-based star trek game (like the one I played on a
Pr1me in 1977 or 78).

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Star_Trek_games

Does anyone have more info on this? Thanks. --dawn

In 1977, I was playing ST, written in Fortran, on an IBM 360, later
370. Before we got LED terminals (Hazeltine 1500), one of the
terminals we used was the LA36 with a 110baud modem. On one hand I'll
scoff jokingly at 300baud, and on the other hand I know some people
will tell me they had to wire a breadboard to play ST, and only got
the results of their torpedo shots once per week from a batch run.
And before anyone scoffs at the terminal, yeah, ST was resident on the
system but we had to punch cards for most anything else we wanted to
do.

The Pick BASIC version of ST was a verbatim implementation of the
Fortran (WATFIV) (and later PDP-11 RSTS-BASIC) version. I don't
believe Ken Simms authored it, only hacked it up like the rest of us.

Singin "Those Were the Days...".
T

chandru wrote:

To: Tony Gravagno
Tony wrote:
Where could I find a copy of the Pick version of ST?

g.

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Back in that era there were actually two types of Star Trek green screen
games going around; the one in this thread had you operating a single
ship that moved from place to place, fired torpedos at specified headings, etc.
The other variant had a fleet of ships that you only managed broadly,
and had the flavor of Sim City or Civilization. The Wiki page on these fan
games call this type "2d shooter/strategy".

Strip off all the Trek jargon and this latter type is quite similar to the game
Conquest that the Commodore Amiga had. I still use a freebie windows version
today to keep my typing skills up, as the stars and ships are all denoted by single
letters, as are most of the bytes you type for commands. A game runs about 10 mins,
and you can save / restore. Runs in a command window on all windoz versions,
as far as I can tell, and C source code is provided too. Better than minesweeper!

"Gene Buckle" <gene.buckle (AT) bbs (DOT) retroarchive.org.remove-h35-this> wrote

"Gene Buckle" wrote:
Once in a long while I stumble on systems that have a GAMES account
which has this source.

IIRC, Reality still distributes a GAMES account in its base package.
Maybe they'll FOSS the source. Now THAT would be historic.

Otherwise, I know Ultimate had such an account as well, so you might
be able to get a release from the Ult-Plus owners. The Ultimate GAMES
account had about 20 games of varying quality, including Adventure
("xyzzy"), Wumpus, and some logic game that some people loved until
you just got to the point where you would win and the game cheated.

TigerLogic should have the code too. I believe a conscious decision
was made not to include it in AP and forward.

If someone gets the source, one of these days I might just turn a
couple of those into text-based web games.

This reminds me that back in the 90's, when I was Corporate Technical
Account Manager at Pick Systems, I had the idea that we could get
mainstream people interested in Pick through games, first playing
them, then hacking, then writing. The few people I talked to about
that didn't appreciate the concept. *sigh*

Good luck getting source - please don't violate any licensing/NDAs.

T