I've been working on a port of Lance Micklus' Star Trek III game to Micro Color BASIC from TRS-80 Model I/III BASIC, which I did some time back. I had been unsatisfied from the start with the flat somewhat weird appearance of the graphic that Micklus devised to represent the starship Enterprise. I was also underwhelmed by the chunky, somewhat oversized appearance, of the Klingon ship. So I finally resolved to try to tweak them a little. Here's how the ships used to look in my original port:
The Klingon looks more like a Romulan Bird of Prey. I toyed with the idea of flipping it upside down and giving it protruding neck, more like the Klingon battle cruisers I was familiar with, but it just looked odd. And I didn't want to stray too far from the original game's look. I just thought it would be better to downsize and tweak the images to take account of the bigger semi-graphic 4 pixels of the MC-10. There was something about the original Enterprise design that just didn't indicate well, to me at least, which direction the ship was pointing. So I added a bridge, after spotting a small Enterprise icon somewhere on the Net that showed what that might look like.
The exercise of opening up the source code also tempted me into squeezing in some code optimizations to speed up menu display a little. And also decided to add some more colour. The game now displays the Status screen with the background color of the current operational condition: Green, Yellow or Red. The flashing "Space Storm" message now has a purple background, and when you collide with something, an orange screen is displayed with that message. I also centred the Status display screen. The old uncentred screen is more obvious on the MC-10 with its contrasting black border to the green text screen background. I also tweaked the combat routines, which use a flashing alternate text color set effect, and tweaked the SOUND commands.
Finally, I added references to all the main bridge characters and other Paramount Star Trek (C) references. I hadn't noticed it before, but the early version of the code (1978/1979?) that I used for my port was obviously done at a time when Micklus was fearful of a possible copyright infringement hit. For example, the Klingons are simply called "Warships", the Enterprise is a "Starship" and the Phasers are a "Beam Weapon." So based on some videos I watched of latter versions of the game (mine is probably TrekIII.3 or before), such as TrekIII.5, I added Sulu on helm, Checkov on weapons, Uhura reporting damages, Spock making science reports and Captain Kirk and the Enterprise on the main menu. So now players can have a full copyright infringing experience like any kid back in the 80s could have if they even knew the scantiest about hacking BASIC program code.
It's a very tough version of the classic Star Trek text game genera. Here are three videos in sequence of me trying to complete the game.
Playthrough 1
Playthrough 3
TREKIII game can be played from my GameJolt page by selecting "Play Game" and then selecting the Star Tek Games Collection of from the menu of my different games collections. Here is the link to my page:
https://gamejolt.com/games/jgmc-10games/339292
Click on the above, choose "Play Game" then "Star Trek Games" then select "TREKIII" from the Cassette menu and type RUN in the main (green) emulator screen.
P.S. If my son Charlie is reading this. There is an easter egg in the code.
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