CGA Trek

Cyan Alert! Set your eyeballs on stunned because it's time for CGA Trek!

CGA Trek is a homage to the "Star Trek" game that originated on mainframe computers in the 1970's,  inspired by the PC version from the late 1980s called EGA Trek. Like Riker and his transporter clone Thomas , or Tuvix, it is simultaneously a demake and remake.

It aims to be a faithful recreation of the basic gameplay but in a modern, accessible, fun package. I wanted something with strong art direction so I picked the austere and beautiful 4-colour CGA palette of early 1980s computing.

A game made for the 2025 Space Game Junkie jam.

Features

• Your very own starship armed with phasers, torpedos, a warp engine, an impulse engine, teletransmatporters, long and short range scanners.
• The alpha quadrant as an 8x8 grid containing 64 sectors.
• Each sector is an 8x8 grid of locations
• Starbases (general, research and weapon depots)
• Planets (with away missions)
• Enemy ships
• A scenario designer with five difficulty settings 
• Authentic 1980s computer voice
• Great 8bit music
• Beautiful, beautiful CGA graphics - 4 colours - using the light magenta/light cyan palette at 320x200 resolution.
• A bunch of surprises for fans of the genre.

Let me know in the forum below if there are any accessibility tweaks I can provide to make this a great experience for you.

History

In 1971, Mike Mayfield wrote the game "Star Trek" for his local university's computer on punch tape. The game was designed to be played via a printer instead of screen.

In the 1970s, with no hard drives or floppy discs, code was often distributed in magazines and other publications. Hobbyists would read the code off paper and type it  into their computer to play it.

It was this way that the code for "Star Trek" spread quickly in the computer world with variations and implementations popping up all over the place. One programmer wrote in the introduction to their version of the game that "There have probably been more versions of this game written than any other as there is probably at least one version around for every type of computer ever made."

While the owners of the original 1960s Star Trek show apparently gave written permission for these fan games to use the elements of the tv series well into the 1970s (a decade when Star Trek was kept alive by the growing fandom) by the 1980s they appeared to have reduced this support. Jerry Pournelle (co-author of the excellent book The Mote In God's Eye - apparently also a computer nerd!) wrote in 1984 that his version of the game was renamed Star Kill after they "received a polite but insistent letter". (He also praised a variant of the game called "Star Fleet I", which has special meaning to the SpaceGameJunkie community!)

Originally written in Sigma 7 BASIC, Trek was rewritten in many other dialects of  BASIC such as HP BASIC and other languages such as FORTRAN.

It was a FORTRAN version of "Star Trek" that inspired Nels Anderson to write a version for the PC in around 1989. He upgraded the plain ASCII graphics to take advantage of new 16 colour hardware made by IBM called the Enhanced Graphics Adapter (EGA). EGA was a big upgrade over IBM's earlier Color Graphics Adapter (CGA) which effectively* did 4 colours.

The Anderson version of the game was titled "EGA Trek" and spread worldwide in the early 1990s as a great example of shareware. EGA Trek is often regarded as the best version of the genre.

While EGA was a big technological upgrade over CGA at the time, in some ways CGA has aged better. Its "weird" colour restrictions have given it a lot of personality compared to the more "normal" palettes of EGA. Additionally, the greater restrictions of CGA (fewer colours, lower resolution) can provide a lot of fun to game developers looking for a challenge.  I hope you enjoy CGA Trek.

With massive apologies and much love to Nels Anderson. 

* the actual colour capabilities of CGA and EGA are too complicated to fully summarise here but are popularly considered to be 4 vs 16 colours.