History
From BeginWiki
Begin was not modeled on Starfleet Battles as many people believe, it was inspired by the HP 2000 minicomputer Basic game called Trek73, which was written in 1973 before Starfleet Battles existed.
Begin is not a port of Trek73, it just used the ideas of modeling continuous movement and events rather than using quadrant-sectors, which was the trend at the time. Begin also uses the story-like text output as it was done in Trek73. The ship systems as they are in Begin 1.65 are also modeled after Trek73.
Why is the game named "Begin"?
The original Trek73, on the HP2000 at the University of Iowa, was split into six programs called Trek73, Trek0, Trek1, Trek2, Trek3, Trek4. Gaming on the HP 2000 was very restricted, so once Tom and Mike got hold of these programs on their personal accounts they were renamed Begin, Set1, Set2, Set3, Set4, Set5, so they would not attract attention.
When the MS DOS version was created the working name was Begin with the intent of renaming it later which of course never happened.
Contributions
Starting with Begin 1.65, players could mail in a contribution of $10 to get a printed Advanced Strategy Manual or $15 for the manual plus floppy. Just under 400 combined contributions were received for Begin 1.65 and 2.0 between 1988 and 1996. Considering it cost around $9 to print the manual and mail it with the floppy disk, plus the time required to process each contribution, it was not a very profitable venture.
Reviews
- Sanyo PC Hackers Newsletter International. Volume 5, Issue 5. San Francisco Bay Area, CA. Sept 1988
- Microtimes. Article: Great Games. A Collection For People Who Take Their Fun Seriously, by Tom Cox. June 12, 1989.
Timeline
- 1984 Tom Nelson and Mike Higgins create Begin on an IBM XT using Desmet C. So that both authors can work simultaneously, Mike uses a Televideo TS-803 CP/M computer to edit his code. The code is transferred to the XT for compiling using a serial port. On the XT the game plays very slowly unless an 8087 math co-processor is installed. The game is limited to nine ships due to the processor speed and limited memory. Desmet C allowed a maximum of 64K code and 64K data. When the code reached 64K development stopped. There were two Desmet builds, one with software floating point, and one which supported the 8087.
- 1985 Demo version released in an effort to sell the full version 1.5. Only one copy was sold.
- 1985 Realtime version of Begin is created by Tom Nelson but never released.
- 1988 Begin is updated to version 1.6 using Borland Turbo C and released as shareware. This version had many improvements including a new setup that allowed the player to select from multiple ship classes.
- 1988 The Micro Foundry BBS is started to support Begin. There was a small core group of very vocal Begin supporters.
- 1989 Begin 1.65 is released which included bug fixes and some AI improvements.
- 1991 Begin 2.0 release 1 is created by Mike Higgins.
- 1993 Begin 2.0 release 2 is created by Mike Higgins.
- 1996 Begin 1.65 compiled under Borland C++ 4.51 but never released.
- 1998 Tom Nelson creates a build of version 1.65 that runs on a MIPS microprocessor development board over a serial port to a terminal emulator. This version was not released.
- 2000 Tom Nelson starts reworking the vanilla C code into C++ under Microsoft VC++ 6.0
- 2004 Ben Hallert starts the BeginStarshipCombat Yahoo Group.
- 2005 Tom Nelson discovers the Begin Yahoo Group while searching Google.
- 2005 Tom Nelson releases some experimental Windows versions.
- 2005 Mike Higgins locates the source for Begin 2.0 release 1. The release 2 source is never found.
- 2008 Tom Nelson starts merging the 2.0 C code into the 1.65 C++ code base.
- 2009 Begin 3.0 for Windows is released as the 25th Anniversary Edition.
