[Vince Weaver] tried to use his time machine to jump a few years in the future to get a less buggy version of Kerbal Space Program, but as usual with time travel, nothing went right and he ended up heading to 1987. Finding himself in an alternate timeline where KSP had been released for the Apple II, he brought back a copy.
Well, that’s the narrative proposed by [Vince Weaver] on his YouTube channel. The real story, and hack, being that he wrote a version of KSP for the Apple II in Applesoft Basic. He has used the language for the ridiculous before. You can build a rocket, select a pilot, launch, and if you’re lucky (or skilled), reach orbit.
We loaded up his disk image on an Apple II emulator and gave it a try. We managed to murde—lose a few pilots, but that was about it. It was hard not to get distracted by the graphics and remember to point the rocket the right direction. Either way, it was a neat bit of fun in retro computing. Video after the break.
But for real, I would love a command-line game similar to this. Does something exist on linux?
I actually prototype the game in C on Linux before I convert to Applesoft, so the core engine for this game is already there (you can find it off the “c” directory in the github repository). It probably wouldn’t be that hard to hook up some color ANSI/ASCII art and have a nice Linux command line version of this.
Emulate it.
Very nice and educative. I often draw my inspiration from “100 BASIC computer games” to see what can be done with only few lines of code. Idea though, not the often horrible code from those days.
Time to dust off the old Apple 2. Great job!
Does anyone remember Rendezvous?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rendezvous:_A_Space_Shuttle_Simulation
Yup. My high school had a copy in our Apple //e lab.
Using machine code routines for fast multiplication using lookup tables would probably improve performance quite a bit. So would an upgrade to a faster Atari 800 or expanded 800XL. I hated using the Apple ][‘s at school as a kid.
I went back to an alternate 18987 and all I got was superherpes! Anyway great job, but since you mentioned it where is the C64 version?
18987? You went to far, man!
this is the one that came to my mind: Project Space Station for the c64:
https://www.google.com/search?q=space+station+game+c64&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8
I see to play Project Space Station on the Apple II all the time! Great game.
Project Space Station was available for the Apple II as well!
Optimal DeltaV is 2.2 for takeoff. If you are below, you are seriously burning through fuel.