I remember the Startrek game from my time at United Computing Systems, UCS, in the 1970s. It was one of the "diversions" we offered for customers, at a cost for online time, of course. As an employee, the cost was not a factor. The game was written in Basic at the time. When I started my own company with a mini computer, I took a copy of it and converted it to Data General's Business Basic. That was the copy I found in my files.
Since Business Basic will not run on today's computers, at least not commonly available ones, another conversion was in order. I don't have Basic anymore and I made the decision after retiring that I would not write anything except Java so that is what I chose. Conversion of relatively clean Basic to Java was not all that difficult and I soon had it working, well, sort of.
Like most computer stuff in the early 70s, games in general and this one specifically were not graphical. In fact, most were played by typing at a keyboard and receiving the response in a printed form. Most of our UCS customers accessed time-sharing via a Teletype model 33 at 10 characters per second over the phone lines. That is painfully true but hard to imagine today.
Games of the time were all "text based", like everything else. I decided to take advantage of some of our modern features to improve the experience just a little. Rather than get too removed from the original experience, I wanted to leave it for the user to enter a command or request at the keyboard then get a printed response back. Since we don't use Teletypes anymore but display screens instead, printing is not desirable so we display on the screen instead. Next, rather than have a long "paper" scroll, I chose the screen for requests as well as responses. Next, since I had a screen, I used it to display the active status of the game. That means the Enterprise bridge as well as the long and short range sensors. You have to see or remember the game to fully understand those terms. This, of course, did not exist in the old versions as the output, at 10 characters per second, would have been time prohibitive. Below is a screenshot of that display. You see the battle status across the top, the sensor displays in the center and the ship's status on the right. At the bottom find the messages center and the scrolling log area. The Displays, of course, stay current as conditions of the game and on the Enterprise change.
