MouseTrek
| Author |
James Randall |
| Publisher |
Not applicable |
| Year of Release |
1992 (approximately) |
| Format |
PC |
| Wub Rating |
|
(Minimum requirements: MS-DOS, a Microsoft Compatible Mouse, 512k RAM, EGA
compatible graphics)
The Game
Now I'm not going to pretend this is up there with the all time game greats but
its a game I have particularly fond memories of - so forgive me giving it a maximum
5 Wubs. It was the first PC program of
any size that I wrote and one of the very first C programs I worked on. You can
see from the source that I hadn't quite grasped the differnce between .c and .h
files and struggled a bit with some of my casting!
Annoyingly I can't remember what hardware I wrote it on - I think it might have
been an old Amstrad PC1640 or perhaps an 80386SX. But I do remember it was
written using Borland Turbo C 1.5 and still compiles under Turbo C 2.0 (which
you can download for free from the Borland website
here) other than a missing header file for dealing with the mouse
(which as I recall was a wrapper for a bunch of int86 calls, I might try and
reconstitute it!).
The game is basically a reinterpreation of the classic mainframe Star Trek
game. Patrol the quadrants, protect your starbases, destroy the enemy ships,
and manage your energy supplies. The difference being that its graphical and
mouse driven. Well. Thats what made it different at the time!
Reinterpretations of this classic game have become a bit of a recurring theme
for me. Due to its simplicty as a game and that its a game I still enjoy
playing I've found it to be a good project to settle me into a new environment,
language, operating system or IDE. I've started (but not always finished)
versions in Microsoft C for Windows (using the plain old API, shudder), in
Visual C++ with MFC, in Visual Basic and in Java. And I've currently got a RISC
OS and a Pocket PC .net Compact Framework version on the go.
Screenshots
A collection of screenshots from the game. Click on the thumbnails to see a
full sized picure. Which still aren't huge - these are EGA screencaps! I
scratched my head for a while as to how I could take screenshots of an old DOS
game from within Windows XP. I was really surprised, and quite impressed, that
you can run old DOS memory resident utilities in command window's in XP and
they still work!
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The title screen. The starship was drawn in code using filled
polygons. I think it came out ok, but lets face it I'm no Rembrandt. More a
Pollock. |
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I spent quite a bit of time on the back story (not pictured) and
the mission briefing. |
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So much time in fact that the briefing was quite interactive -
reusing elements from the game itself. |
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A game, and a battle, in progress. If
you've ever played another version of this game or watched an episode or two of
Star Trek then most of the technobabble on this screen will be familiar to you.
The reroute power button was inspired by the Next Generation episode Best of
Both Worlds. In the game it gives you a last chance shot against a powerful
opponent but causes grevious damage to your own ship.
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The same battle later on - we've taken quite a pounding. |
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As long as your sensors were operational you could check out the
status of enemy ships. And read a bit more background information on them! |
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Another enemy ship, throughout the game the graphics were done in
code using filled polygons. |
Download
You can download the executable and the source code here. There are two
versions - the original which was pretty much finished. And an update that
added the warp rerouting and missions. However I never quite finished the
update and its a bit unbalanced. Both are linked to below!
Enjoy :)
