It is the year 2025.
I am playing Mike Mayfield’s original 1972 Star Trek game in a TRS-80 Color Computer 3 (released 1986) emulator on my Linux Mint Debian Edition machine.
I did not have a CoCo 3. I wanted a CoCo 3. I had a CoCo 2, and I loved it.
My first computer was a Timex-Sinclair 1000, and around 1983 or 1984, Radio Shack did a trade-in offer, where people could trade the T-S 1000 toward a newer, better computer, the TRS-80 Color Computer 2. With a real keyboard! And color! Neither of which the T-S 1000 had.
At times over the years, I’ve regretted that we got rid of the T-S 1000.
I’ve had a Color Computer emulator on my Windows machines since about 1997. I had — actually, still have — T3, which emulated the CoCo 2. My Shire Reckoning plug-in for WordPress was originally written in Extended Color Basic for the CoCo 2 in T3. I think I’ve posted the source code for it in the past. It’s not the greatest thing in the world, but it does what it needs to do. I even ported it to VBA for either Microsoft Word or Microsoft Excel. Excel, I think. I’ll have to go back and look at my macros for work.
Recently — meaning, within the last six, eight months — I took a look at XRoar, and I tinker with it from time to time. There’s an archive of games for the MC-10, the CoCo’s little cousin, on archive.org, and I worked out how to load a program using MC-10 emulation and extract the BASIC source code so I can then load it in the CoCo 2 or CoCo 3 emulation modes as an ASCII file.
Which is how I have Mayfield’s Star Trek game, keyed in for the MC-10, running on a CoCo 3.
I have had a photocopy of David H. Ahl’s Super Star Trek source code from Creative Computing, and I always wanted to key that into the CoCo 2, but it was a long program, and it would have been a lot of work. I think I have that now as a text file, though I also have the really cool fan game that melds Super Star Trek to Interplay’s 25th-Anniversary interface…
Twelve year-old me would be ecstatic in ways you cannot imagine.