philosaur wrote:Are you the original author of that Star Trek game? I played that when I was a larval-stage gamer. IIRC, it was hosted on numerous BBSs right alongside ASCII pr0n.
I was definitely
not the original author (if it can be considered to have had one).
You can read more about the remarkable history of the Star Trek game
here.
My part in it was solely to find a copy in the early '80s on the campus mainframe, cleverly disguised under the filename WHTHSE (which then became STRTRK). But this was Super Star Trek, adapted from the simpler original game by numerous people before me.
I maintained and (slightly) enhanced the local PL/I version until 1985, but I sort of didn't have a PL/I compiler after that.
I did keep the original punched card deck of the game, though, as well as a fanfold paper printout of the 1985 version. Eventually I decided it might be fun to convert it to run in JavaScript as a web-playable version.
Rather than paying to have the punched cards read, though, I just typed the whole thing back in from the printed version. Then I had to convert the 368 GOTO statements to functions without breaking any of the logic.
That cleaned-up version is
now playable. I may yet decide to "improve" it -- Super Duper Star Trek, anyone?