Summary

Super Star Trek, a timeless classic of computer games

Save the Federation from the invading Klingons! Visit exotic planets and strip-mine them for dilithium! Encounter mysterious space thingies!

SST2K is a modern Unix port of the University of Texas "Star Trek" game originally written in FORTRAN in the mid-1970s. It has options to restrict its feature set to what was in earlier versions.

SST2K is a kind of time machine back to what interactive programs were like in the days of hardcopy terminals, before graphics and before even video displays. Despite this archaism and decades after it was written, SST2K retains significant play value. We think it's both fun and instructive to see how good a game could be written under those conditions.

SST is fairly closely related to Eric Allman's BSD Trek, which also started life as a C translation of UT Super Star Trek. BSD Trek is missing most of the post-1978 features of SST2K, but does add a cloaking device for the Romulans and the option to take Klingon captives. These have been back-ported into this version.

The only other really current Star Trek port we know of is OpenTrek, which appears to be set in the ST:TNG universe (featuring the Borg Collective as the villains) and has a fancy graphical interface.

(There are also some multi-player Trek variants out there, notably XTrek and NetTrek, that have a very different feel from any of the Trek solitaires.)

For a truly retro-Trek experience, see the Star Trek ASCII Art Archive.

Resources


NEWSproject news
TODOto-do file
COPYINGproject license
super-star-trek-2.8.tar.gzgzipped source tarball
READMEroadmap file
sst.htmlHTML rendering of sst.6
sst-doc.htmlSuper Star Trek

The project repository is at https://gitlab.com/esr/super-star-trek.

If you appreciate this code (and especially if you make money by using it) please support me on Patreon.

Recent Changes

    Fix for enemy dispersion on torpedo hits.
    Re-conform to the documentation by removing the .py estension from sst.
    Fancy-mode coordinates can have the Y as a letter, e,g. "c4" = "3 - 4".
    Wayback option: you can revert the game to the behavior of past years.

Supporters

This work is funded by...

My Bronze supporters: Martin Hohenberg, Jae Yang, Daniel Garber, Kyle Burkholder, Mike Nichols, Mark Ping, Tom Taylor, Arnold F. Williams, George Brower, Michael Nygard, Brendan Long, Sven Dowideit, Dave Witten, Jonathan Cast, James Cronin, David L. Jessup, Christopher Chang, Killer Delicious, Jacob Lyles, Neil Anuskiewicz, Mordant, Clemens Ladisch, Wojciech Woytniak, Masa Bando, John Carmack, Xingyu Wang, Jane Tang, Steven Evans, Jan Roudaut, Hsueh Sung, Ken LaCrosse, taishi28012, John Simpson, Jerod Tufte, Paul Abbott, Stan Witherspoon, Donald Greer, Gratiela Chergu, Michael Ciagala, Dale Carstensen, Chip Davis, Liudmilla Karukina, Jim McCloskey, Dewey Sasser, Hal Hildebrand, Connor Wood, Ken Kennedy, darrin, Mark Gardner, William Christensen, Malcolm Ocean, Rod Davenport, Nodarius Darjania, Cheryl Evry, Wenfeng Liang, Irving Rivas, Bill Soistman, ReallyBored, Άρης Δάσος, Ron Lauzon, TheFred, Paul Theodoropolous, Doug Phillips, Les Vogel, Matt Pollard, Andres Cordova, Umgeher Torgersen, Syeed Ali, Raghu Veer Dendukuri, Perry The Cynic, Gustav A Wirth, Mitchell Bryant, Matt Krueger, Jim Mog, John D. Taylor.

My Institutional supporters: Jason Azze and the DEVOPS team at his $DAYJOB, Christoph Happle, Symmetry Investments, Willam Duff, Mark Atwood, Caleb LaVergne, zariah mccall.

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