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By N2H
Welcome to Raph Koster's personal website: MMOs, gaming, writing, art, music, books.

Star Traders

February 27th, 2007

Star Traders screenshotFor some reason, today was “REALLY retro” game day here at work. And after we moved from Star Raiders to the TRS-80 version of Space War, I remembered another oldie game I loved: Star Traders, which I played on an Osborne I running CP/M.

A quick Google later I find bsittler’s Home Page, which has some very familiar source code on it (scroll a bit down). I remember trying to port this very same source code from MS-BASIC to Atari BASIC…

And then, a bit later, I’m playing it. Grab it here (tiny ZIP file). The “ntrade” version no longer works, but the old classic version still does. Eridani Outfitters has merged with Betelgeuse, and there was a 2 for 1 stock split…

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7 Responses to “Star Traders”

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  1. rascunho » Seção de dados do blog » links for 2007-02-28 wrote on

    [...] Raph’s Website » Star Traders For some reason, today was “REALLY retro” game day here at work. And after we moved from Star Raiders to the TRS-80 version of Space War, I remembered another oldie game I loved: Star Traders, which I played on an Osborne I running CP/M. (tags: http://www.raphkoster.com 2007 at_tecp games star_traders jogos space_war strategy) [...]

Reader Comments
  1. dsutton said on

    Wow! A blast from the past …

    In the last few weeks, I’ve been checking out some legacy games that I’d played on the Atari 800. Star Raiders is one of the staples, being the first “PC” game that I played, although I rarely get above the rank “Garbage Scow Captain” now. My most recent exploration has been with “Autoduel”, which I loved for the sandbox nature, but I hated because it was so damn boring.

    Actually, after doing a “quick read” through this post, I was hoping to read through some Atari BASIC source code … we didn’t call it “source code” back then, did we? I loved Atari BASIC in the way it used strings and the way one could manipulate bytes by using them.

    Oh well, so much for nostalgia … back to using char arrays :)

  2. Relmstein said on

    Think the oldest Space Game I ever really played was Master of Orion on a 486. I hear star traders and start raiders were the forerunners of the space strategy games only they had more fps elements. Might have to try them out.

  3. Raph said on

    Star Raiders is totally a first person shooting experience. Amazing that it fit in 16k, with everything it has in it.

    Star Traders, however, is so so not. :) Nothing but econ strategy.

  4. m3mnoch said on

    mmm…. i miss wizard’s crown and eternal dagger.

    m3mnoch.

  5. Tim said on

    Fantastic! This is the first game I ever played, back on a TTY in the 70’s. That and Adventure. Forget those Zork “clones” I’ll go for the original thanks :^)

  6. Crissa said on

    I taught my sister how to type and do simple math with an MSDOS clone of that game…

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