Curses Interface By
Stas Sergeev
- SST 2K polishing and historical research by
+ SST2K polishing and historical research by
Eric S. Raymond
</literallayout>
</dedication>
a lot more meaningful to you.</para>
<para>You have weapons: phasers and photon torpedoes. You have a defense:
-deflector shields. You can look at things: long-range scaners,
+deflector shields. You can look at things: long-range scanners,
short-range scanners, and a star chart. You can move about, under
warp drive or impulse power. You can also dock at a starbase, rest
while repairs are being made, abandon ship, self destruct, or give up
</chapter>
<chapter><title>Starting the Game</title>
+<!-- This chapter is new in SST 2K -->
<para>The program will ask you some setup questions. You can give it
command-line arguments that will be treated as answers. Any token
<para>The fourth question, new in SST2K, sets your game options. A
blank answer or 'fancy' enables all SST2K features. The option
-'plain' disables a number of features (Tholians, planets &
-dilithium, Thingies shooting back, deep-space-probes, Klingon ramming
-and movement, time-warping through black holes, death-ray upgrade),
-approximating the original CDC 6600 FORTRAN game from UT Austin. The
-option 'almy' approximates Tom Almy's C translation from 1979,
-disabling Thingies shooting back, base shields, and time-warping
-through black holes.</para>
+'plain' approximated the original CDC 6600 FORTRAN game from UT Austin
+and disables a number of features: Tholians, planets & dilithium,
+Thingies shooting back, deep-space-probes, Klingon ramming and
+movement, time-warping through black holes, death-ray
+upgrade. inhabited worlds. The option 'almy' approximates Tom Almy's
+C translation from 1979, disabling Thingies shooting back, base
+shields, time-warping through black holes, and inhabited
+worlds.</para>
</chapter>
<chapter><title>How To Issue Commands</title>
or more commands begin with the same letter, and in this case that
letter refers to a particular one of the commands; to get the other,
your abbreviation must be two or more characters long. This sounds
-complicated, but you will learn the abbreviations qGuickly enough.</para>
+complicated, but you will learn the abbreviations quickly enough.</para>
<para>What this all boils down to is:</para>
There are ordinary Klingons (K) at sectors 5 - 8 and 6 - 2, and a
Klingon Commander (C) at 9 - 9. The (GULP)
<quote>Super-commander</quote> (S) is occupies sector 4 - 4, and a
-Romulan (R) is at 1 - 6. A planet (P) is at sector 7 - 6. There are
+Romulan (R) is at 1 - 6. An uninhabited planet (P) is at sector 7 - 6
+(if it were inhabited, it would display as a '@'). There are
also a large number of stars (*). The periods (.) are just empty
space—they are printed to help you get your bearings. Sector 6
- 4 contains a black hole ( ).</para>
<para>If your short-range sensors are damaged, this command will only show
the contents of adjacent sectors.</para>
+
</sect1>
<sect1><title>Status Report</title>
</listitem>
</varlistentry>
<varlistentry>
-<term>LIFE SUPPOR</term>
+<term>LIFE SUPPORT</term>
<listitem>
<para>If <quote>ACTIVE</quote> then life support systems are functioning
normally. If on <quote>RESERVES</quote> the number is how many stardates your
reserve food, air, etc. will last—you must get repairs made or get to
-starbase before your reserves run out.</para>
+a starbase before your reserves run out.</para>
</listitem>
</varlistentry>
<varlistentry>
<para>Long-range scans are free. They use up no energy or time, and can be
done safely regardless of battle conditions.</para>
+
</sect1>
<sect1><title>Star Chart</title>
</literallayout>
<para>As you proceed in the game, you learn more and more about what things
-are where in the galaxy. When ever you first do a scan in a quadrant,
+are where in the galaxy. Whenever you first do a scan in a quadrant,
telemetry sensors are ejected which will report any changes in the
quadrant(s) back to your ship, providing the sub-space radio is
working. Spock will enter this information in the chart. If the radio
<para>and it will be done. In automatic mode, either two or four numbers
must be supplied.</para>
-<para>Automatic mode utilizes the ship's <quote>battle computer.</quote> If the
-computer is damaged, manual movement must be used.</para>
+<para>Automatic mode utilizes the ship's <quote>battle
+computer.</quote> If the computer is damaged, manual movement must be
+used.</para>
<para>If warp engines are damaged less than 10 stardates (undocked) you can
still go warp 4.</para>
<literallayout>
Mnemonic: REST
Shortest abbreviation: R
-Full command: REST <NUMBER OF STARDATES>
+Full command: REST <NUMBER-OF-STARDATES>
</literallayout>
<para>This command simply allows the specified number of stardates to go
until repairs are made before you go back into battle.</para>
<para>It is not generally advisable to rest while you are under attack by
-Klingons.</para>
+Klingons or Romulans.</para>
</sect1>
<sect1><title>Call Starbase for Help</title>
</literallayout>
<para>[Originally, this command was called <quote>HELP</quote>, but
-these days that might be misconstrued as an attempt to browae built-in
+these days that might be misconstrued as an attempt to browse built-in
documentation! In some later versions it was CALL.]</para>
<para>When you get into serious trouble, you may call a starbase for
Shortest abbreviation: PL
</literallayout>
-<para>Mr. Spock presents you a list of the available information on planets
-in the galaxy. Since planets do not show up on long-range scans, the
-only way to obtain this information is with the <quote>SENSORS</quote> command.</para>
+<para>Mr. Spock presents you a list of the available information on
+planets in the galaxy which are potential dilithium sources. Since
+planets do not show up on long-range scans, the only way to obtain
+this information is with the <quote>SENSORS</quote> command.</para>
</sect1>
<sect1 id="freeze"><title>Freeze</title>
promotion available if you go beyond the <quote>Expert</quote> range.
You can also have a certificate of merit printed with your name, date,
and Klingon kill rate, provided you are promoted from either the
-<quote>Expert</quote> or <quote>Emeritus</quote> levels. This
-<quote>plaque</quote> requires a 132 column printer. You may need
+<quote>Expert</quote> or <quote>Emeritus</quote> levels. You may need
print the certificate to a file, import it into your word processor,
selecting Courier 8pt font, and then print in <quote>landscape
orientation</quote>.</para>
+<!-- The plaque used to require an 132 column printer. Stas changed that. -->
</chapter>
<chapter><title>Handy Reference Page</title>
<para>Dave Matuszek, Paul Reynolds et. al. at UT Austin played the
Hicks version on a CDC6600, but disliked the long load time and
extreme slowness of the BASIC program. (David Matuszek notes that the
-Hicks version he played had a habit of throwing long
-quotes from Marcus Aurelius at the users, a feature he found
-intolerable on a TTY at 110 baud. It must, therefore, have been
-rather longer than the one we have.) The Austin crew proceeded to
-write their own Trek game, loosely based on the Hicks version, in
-CDC6600 FORTRAN. At that time, it was just called "Star Trek"; the
-"Super" was added by later developers. In the rest of this history
-we'll call it the "UT FORTRAN" version.</para>
+Hicks version he played had a habit of throwing long quotes from
+Marcus Aurelius at the users, a feature he found intolerable on a TTY
+at 110 baud. It must, therefore, have been rather longer than the one
+we have.)</para>
+
+<para>The Austin crew proceeded to write their own Trek game, loosely
+based on the Hicks version, in CDC6600 FORTRAN. Most of the code was
+written in 1973-1974. At that time, the game was just called "Star
+Trek"; the "Super" was added by later developers. In the rest of this
+history we'll call it the "UT FORTRAN" version.</para>
+
+<para>Dave Matuszek reports that the UT FORTRAN codebase he worked on
+in 1973-1974 was like Mayfield's original and most later versions in
+BASIC, in that it used used polar coordinates (a clockface angle
+and a distance) for manual navigation.</para>
<para>At the time the UT FORTRAN source was last translated to C it emitted
the message "Latest update-21 Sept 78". Thus, it actually predated
Star Trek" published by David Ahl in his November 1978 sequel
<citetitle>BASIC Computer Games</citetitle>.</para>
-<para>This 1978 "Super Star Trek" had been reworked by Robert Leedom and
-friends from (according to Leedom) Mayfield's HP port. There is
+<para>This 1978 "Super Star Trek" had been reworked by Robert Leedom
+and friends from (according to Leedom) Mayfield's HP port. There is
internal evidence to suggest that at least some features of Leedom's
SST may have derived from the UT FORTRAN version. In particular, Dave
Matuszek recalls implementing command words to replace the original
-numeric command codes, a feature Leedom's SST also had but the
-1973 and 1975 SPACWRs did not.</para>
+numeric command codes during 1973-1974, a feature Leedom's SST also
+had but the 1973 and 1975 SPACWRs did not.</para>
<para>One signature trait of the UT FORTRAN game and its descendants
is that the sectors are 10x10 (rather than the 8x8 in Mike Mayfield's
astronomically-named quadrants introduced in Ahl's SST and its
descendants.</para>
-<!-- Dave thinks his Fortran Star Trek used the clockface for quadrant -->
-<!-- navigation. -->
-
<para>Eric Allman's BSD Trek game is one of these, also descended from
the UT FORTRAN version via translation to C. However, the mainline version
(now SST2K) has had a lot more stuff folded into it over the years
command descriptions, and changed some logic in sst.c to match.
</para></listitem>
<listitem><para>
-I've cleaned up a lot of grubby FORTRANisms in the code internals --
+I've cleaned up a lot of grubby FORTRANisms in the code internals —
used sizeof(), replaced magic numeric constants with #defines,
that sort of thing.
</para></listitem>
projects / super-star-trek.git / blobdiff