The Tale of My Beloved Stellar Empires

It’s story-time again! This one has a bit of almost all things World of Code about it: early computing history, strategy gaming, programming, BASIC, some actual code analysis, engagement with real-live early programmers, me getting names mixed up, the relationship between computer hardware and software, an actual hardware/software BASIC programming project, and AI triumphs and failures (mostly failures). Let me take you back in time to the early days of my programming and computer-gaming history, and forward to a significant future programming project intended to take folks back to the past, and down into the weeds of debugging and building what, for me, is a pretty significant project.

I do get a little bit technical towards the end, but, if you make it that far, do bear with me… I try to make it mostly understandable and my intention as a story-teller is to give you a sense of the joys and perils of programming that is hopefully at least impressionistically accessible to the non-programmer.

I feel particularly bad about mixing up Ted and Drew Shorter, the son and father duo who ported my favourite game, “Stellar Empires” (the main subject of this story), to the TRS-80 Color Computer, where I encountered it. For the record, Ted is the son and Drew is the father, and it was Drew (now more than 80!), who, as far as we know, added the “computer player” feature to the game that enabled me to get into it as a solo player—and that really got me digging into the code to reprogram it! I didn’t “re-shoot” that portion because this whole video-podcast was actually done in a single take (and then lightly edited), and I didn’t want to mess with the continuity. I owe a debt of deep gratitude to them and to the game’s original author, Graham Wilson, that this story and this project are attempting to honour.

This episode is based, in part, on the following blog-posts, which I hope to transfer over soon to my brand-new technically focussed Substack, Back to BASIC:

* The Stellar Empires Project, Part I: The Program, Its Significance to Me, and the Project Proposal

* The Stellar Empires Project, Part II: Porting and the Early “Open Source” Community

* The Stellar Empires Project, Part III: The Plan, the Problems, and the Development Environment

And I would be remiss if I did not also include a link to Graham Wilson’s very enjoyable StellarEmpires.net site!

This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit geekorthodox.substack.com/subscribe