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jcoffey-dev d623315517 The remaster: a bridge, two bands, and a real modem

Adds the cel-shaded skin, the score and the sound, and puts the skin
machinery back so the toggle under the frame has somewhere to go.

The remaster is a bridge rather than a paper column: the ship down the left
as meters and pips, a cel-shaded sensor grid in the middle, the log down the
right. Both panels are devices -- break the short range sensors and the
sector grid goes dark, break the computer and the chart does, and the chart
draws what has been scanned rather than the galaxy as it is. Scans are drawn
instead of printed, so the log gets the sentences and stops being eight rows
of ASCII squeezed into a strip.

One theme, two arrangements, so switching skin re-scores the piece rather
than changing the record: brass, strings and timpani for the remaster, the
same eight bars as a three-channel chiptune for 1971. Written in the idiom
rather than quoted from it, for the same reason the game is not called what
you expect -- NOTICE.md now argues both. Effects are the ship's: warp, beams,
torpedo, hit, explode, klaxon, dock, and the print head on paper only.

The boot dials in for real: Bell 103 at the real frequencies, which is what a
110-baud acoustic coupler sounded like and not the modem noise everybody
remembers. The synth engine is the siblings', unforked.

Tests cover the music the only way a test can: a mistyped note name does not
throw, it silently removes a voice, so every step of every track is checked
against the parser.

2026-09-08 23:45:25 -07:00

6.9 KiB

Raw Blame History

Notice, credits and provenance

What this is

An independent reimplementation of the starship patrol game that went round timesharing systems from 1971 and then every home computer of the following decade, written from scratch in TypeScript in 2026.

Credit where it is due

Mike Mayfield, 1971 — wrote the original, on a Sigma 7 at a college in California, in BASIC, for a machine with no screen. An eight by eight galaxy of eight by eight sectors, searched three digits at a time, is his idea and it is a very good one.
David Ahl and Creative Computing, who carried the version most people actually met, in the type-in book that put a hundred games on a hundred thousand desks.
Every university terminal room and school computer club that passed it along, which is how it got everywhere.

This project is not affiliated with or endorsed by anyone connected to the original, or with any television programme. No original source code was used, consulted or copied.

Why it is not called what you expect

The 1971 game and its descendants borrowed their setting, and their nouns, from a television series. Those nouns are live trademarks belonging to a company that enforces them, and this is a public site with somebody's name on the footer.

So the mechanics are rebuilt and the vocabulary is ours:

The original's	Ours
the ship, the fleet, the enemy	your ship, the Fleet, raiders
the energy weapon	beams
the guided weapon	torpedoes
starbase, shields, warp, damage control, stardate	kept — generic to the whole genre, and to science fiction generally

None of that is a copyright question. Game mechanics are ideas rather than expression, and nobody gets to fence off an eight by eight grid. Names are a trademark question, which is a different thing entirely: it is about whether a reader would think this came from them. Calling it Long Range Scan and naming the enemy raiders answers that, and costs the game nothing — the three digits on the chart are what anybody actually remembers.

How this code came to exist

Clean-room, and worth being specific about because it is what makes the licence below meaningful:

The rules are not ours to own, and we use them freely. Sixty-four quadrants of sixty-four sectors, three digits a quadrant, courses 1 to 9 round the compass, warp 1 for eight sectors, energy that is also your shields, eight devices that break. All of it is arithmetic that has been in print since 1978.
The constants are reconstructed from behaviour, not copied from a listing. How much a warp costs, how hard a raider hits at range, how long a repair takes — these are in src/game/constants.ts, each with the reasoning next to it, and the places where a judgement call was needed are marked as judgement calls.
The artwork and the music are ours. There are no imported assets of any kind. Every mark on the remaster's sensors is SVG generated from the game state in src/components/TacticalView.tsx, and every note is generated by the synth in src/audio/. The only drawing in the repository is public/favicon.svg, which is a scan grid.
The synth is shared with its siblings. src/audio/synth.ts is the same engine as the one in lemonade and wumpus -- same author, same licence. What is written for it here is new.

The words on screen are ours, deliberately

This is the part worth reading, because the obvious thing to do was the wrong thing.

The published listings have memorable lines in them. Those sentences are their authors' writing, not a rule and not a fact — and a project released under a copyleft licence has no business licensing words it did not write. The two sibling games make exactly this argument in their own NOTICE files; this one never shipped with anybody else's wording.

So every line the machine prints here was written for this project, and they live together in src/game/constants.ts where they can be checked. They are shouted because the terminal had no lower case, not because we are shouting.

Two things are not original, and neither is a copyright question:

COMMAND ?, COURSE (1-9) ?, WARP FACTOR (0-8) ?. These are the only sensible words for what they ask, and asking them one at a time is what a printing terminal forces on you rather than a style anybody chose.
The three-digit quadrant code. 205 meaning two raiders, no starbase and five stars is a fact about an encoding. There is no expression in it to own, and changing it would break the one piece of shared literacy this genre has.

The music is ours too, and this is the same argument

The score is not the television theme, or any part of it, or a paraphrase of one. It would be a strange sort of care to rename the enemy and then quote sixteen bars of somebody's music. Every note in src/audio/deepspace.ts and src/audio/tunes.ts was written for this project.

What it borrows is the idiom, which belongs to nobody: brass in a major key, a melody built on rising fourths and fifths that holds its top note longer than a pop tune would dare, strings moving one chord a bar, timpani. That is how film and television have said "space, and it matters" since the 1950s, and it is older than any of them -- it is Holst, and before him Wagner. Nobody owns a perfect fifth.

The 1971 skin plays the same theme as a three-channel chiptune, which is a claim about history rather than about the original: the game itself was silent, played on a printing terminal whose only instrument was its own print head. What the chiptune represents is the port it would have got when the listing followed everybody home, and tunes.ts says so at the top rather than leaving it to be assumed.

One rule that is ours

The original ends when the clock does. So does this. What is new is the frame: one to four captains fly one patrol each, in turn, and are ranked against each other and against the shared board — raiders destroyed, then days left, then torpedoes unfired. The reasoning is in src/game/reducer.ts.

Licence

This program is free software: you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU Affero General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation, either version 3 of the License, or (at your option) any later version — see LICENSE.

AGPL rather than plain GPL because the leaderboard is a network service: §13 means anyone who runs a modified copy of this for other people over a network has to offer them its source. Running the game without the scores service is entirely supported and imposes nothing extra.

This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU Affero General Public License for more details.

None of the above is legal advice.

6.9 KiB Raw Blame History