Here's a video demo of the game that is hosted here.
This is a different BASIC Star Trek game from the 1970s!
You might be familiar with the better-known Star Trek game from that time, which printed out charts of the current quadrant and the galaxy. Wikipedia has an article about it.
But at the same time, there was another Star Trek game. It also involved a battle between your starship and an enemy, but it was script-based. Your orders, and Spock's, Sulu's, Chekov's and Uhura's responses, were printed out in scripted dialog form. Wikipedia has a paragraph about it.
I played this game in the '70s at the Boston Museum of Science, where they had an ASR-33 dialed into a remote PDP-10. For 40 years, I've been looking for a copy of this game. I couldn't find any. Don Daglow, whose modified version of the original program was distributed by DECUS, didn't have it. I looked for an image of the DECUS tape, but never found it.
By luck, I was in a Facebook BASIC group in 2022 when Gary Boyer posted that he had a bunch of listings of Star Trek games from the 1970s. I told him about the script-based game and asked him to look for it. It turned out he had it!
As far as I know, it is the only existing copy of the game!
He scanned the printout and posted the images on FB. I downloaded them and I'm hosting them here, in the Scans directory.
According to Gary, he got the printouts at Lehigh University in 1975, when he was 12 years old! A little Googling revealed that Lehigh had a CDC 6000 system at the time. A little more Googling turned up the manual for the CDC 6000's dialect of BASIC.
Source/CDC 6000/BASTREK.BAS contains my transcription of the program listing. If you find any errors, please let me know.
I welcome ports to other versions of BASIC and even other languages. I will host them under the Sources/ directory.
- Bob Alexander