Star Trek for Intel MDS

[Jon Hales]

Hi All

I have received an Intel 8-inch disk and two printouts with 'Super Star Trek' attributed to Ron Williams 'of Intel'.

The main purpose of this message is to ask whether any member of Intel-Devsys:

* is familiar with this MDS game (and/or)

* has a floppy disk (or more than one disk) with the game (and/or)

* has a listing (or listings) of the code (and/or)

* has documentation of the hardware requirements for playing the game (and/or)

* knows whether the Intel version was closely related to other 'Star Trek' games of the 1970s?

The double-density disk has ISIS files, but also a number of one-byte files.

A ten-page listing contains a directory of a disk :F5:STARRE.* which includes:

STRTRK.SRC   456 blocks and length 57309

STRTRK.BAS   598 blocks and length 75186

STRTRK.TXT    502 blocks and length 63232 [...]

The ten-page listing includes three ISIS PL/M-80 V3.1 routines:

- Module TRKOR with object module placed in :F1:STARRE.OBJ (not on the floppy) and 'invoked by' PLM80 :F1:STARRE.SRC. The listing runs from line 1 to line 73.

- Module STRSRC with object module placed in :F1:STRSR1.OBJ (not on the floppy) and 'invoked by' PLM80 :F1:STRSR1.SRC. The listing runs from line 1 to line 142.

- Module STRSRC with object module placed in :F1:STRSRC.OBJ (not on the floppy) and 'invoked by' PLM80 :F1:STRSRC.SRC.

A second listing runs to 40 pages in total. Of these, 27 pages have single-spaced 'text' (code) with line numbers, while other pages also have line numbers, but the output lines are widely spaced.

Both listings are in dot-matrix text - which presents substantial challenges for optical character recognition.

To avoid duplication of effort, I'm not making the disk image or scans available just now.

I must acknowledge that Sid Jones knows/knew the game and may have a disk or disks. The aim of this message is to assess how widely the game is remembered among others in the group and whether other 'Star Trek' materials for MDS have survived. 

Best regards

Jon

[Sid Jones]

Very quick answer is that SST was a one-disc, own boot programme, didn’t use the ISIS-II OS, simply grabbed track zero and then copied everything into memory.

 

I do have a copy, can’t remember how I cloned it back in 1979 (didn’t use an ISIS-II copy function, must have had a sector copier of some sort) but it runs on an MDS800 as a glorified ‘text adventure’.

 

At 2400 baud... No fancy graphics, no cursor control on the screen. Would run on a TTY if inclined!

 

You can ask for maps by doing long/short range scans and warping between sectors. Fire spreads of photon torpedoes or phaser bursts.

 

ISTR remember back in the day when I was a mere youth of reverse engineering the code. All written in a Basic dialect with keywords replaced by binary token values.

 

The strings and variable names remained as ASCII items in the blob of memory.

 

Having got my MDS888 (actual one from my work days) functional, I’ll dig through my snaffled collection of 8” floppy discs and dig stuff out.

 

If anybody has an ISIS-II programme to extract track/sector data from disc to image on a PC, that would be very useful.

 

(Hang on, I used to write this sort of thing! Hold my PL/M 80 compiler...)

 

Regards

 

Sid

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[Herbert Johnson]

Well, all sorts of "Star Trek" games were produced across many systems,
in the era. There's no clear order to them, Jon, any more than there's a
clear order to all the BASIC implementations in the era.

Sid suggests, the disk may not be entirely "ISIS" compatible, with ISIS
like file directories and so on. I may be ISIS-formatted at the sector
level. Thus your paper listings may be the critical clues to the disk
content.

Please don't hyper-focus on getting the many text-pages OCRed for Claude
to process. Please *optical scan the pages* first so that human eyes can
read them as files when grabbing the *image file* you'll make of the
diskette. Humans not OCR & AI will resolve this disk, OCR can happen
later. [It may be found that the text is already on the disk, just a guess.]

It would appear that this was a one-disk do-it-all to run the game on
cold MDS-800 hardware. a fun thing might be, my guess, that PL/M-80 was
used to load some kind of BASIC and manage the I/O needed to play this
game.

Sounds like fun to me, well worth analyzing. a good acquisition on your
part, Jon! - regards Herb

On 4/19/2026 1:58 PM, Sid Jones wrote:
> Very quick answer is that SST was a one-disc, one boot programme, didn’t

> use the ISIS-II OS, simply grabbed track zero and then copied everything
> into memory.

> *From:* Jon Hales

> I have received an Intel 8-inch disk and two printouts with 'Super Star
> Trek' attributed to Ron Williams 'of Intel'.

Herb Johnson, New Jersey USA
http://www.retrotechnology.com or .net
preserve and restore 1970's personal computing
email: hjohnson @ retrotechnology dot com
or try later at herbjohnson @ comcast dot net

[Sid Jones]

Having got my MDS888 awake for the first time since the 1980's, I've been
going through the roughly 250 8" discs in my collection.

Most are 'business', a few are ISIS-II resources such as assemblers,
compilers, tools etc (anybody got the manual for the ISIS-II tookit?) and
the odd game.

I've found my reverse engineered listing of the Star Trek Track 0 boot
programme and I'm hopeful that the de-tokenised BASIC code will be in there
somewhere...

In the meantime I've got a few minutes this morning to create a
quick'n'dirty disc scanner to dump track/sector contents as ASCII hex.

The output will be via the console (Doh! Can't stick 500 kb of data in ASCII
HEX on to another floppy, funnily enough...) at really slow rates...

Might take 20 minutes or so to stream 77 track of 52 sectors. That's if I
boost the serial port to 9600 baud. Otherwise at 2400 baud it's going to be
well over an hour...

Then a smidgeon of post-processing on a PC to get the ASCII strings for the
variables and labels.

(This is obviously going to make the work I did back in the 1980's on the
Star Trek game pop up on another floppy in my collection...)

Regards

Sid

PS Even better, I've found the 4040 source code to the Decca Navigator
receiver that I wrote in Uni back in 1974-1977. Gosh, it's so simple.

And it took me THREE YEARS to write 1280 bytes of code!!!

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