🖖 Space the Ultimate Frontier

Captain’s Log

Stardate: sometime in the late, mid-eighties…

 My very first computer game on my very first computer was the 1986 release of ‘Space the Ultimate Frontier’ for the Commodore 64/128. I remember visiting my first computer store (with a big neon sign) at a PX in Germany and spotting the cool spaceship on the cover. I was immediately sold! It would be my first introduction to what games on a computer could be. There was strategy, energy management, action—all with SID chip music and sound effects. I was hooked on computer games from that point on.

Playing the game today is as easy as could be. The Internet Archive has an emulated copy that is playable in your web browser: Space the Ultimate Frontier.

You can also get your own copy and run it with the VICE emulator on any platform you can think of (pretty sure I saw a BeOS download link!). 47KB of glorious C64 starship combat awaits

The only problem is, how do you play it?

Starship Combat

You have been ordered to defend starbases on the border from attack by a force of Klyron ships. You start off in command of the USS Enterprise but if you die, you take command of a sister ship, the USS Columbia. Your ship has a number of systems accessible by number:

1) HELM CONTROL 
2) SHORT RANGE SCAN (SRS)
3) LONG RANGE SCAN (LRS)
4) PULSAR CONTROL
5) PHOTON TORPEDO CONTROL
6) SHIELD CONTROL
7) SUBSPACE COMMUNICATIONS
8) LIBRARY COMPUTER
9) TRACTOR BEAM
01) WEAPONS STATUS
02) RESUPPLY
03) POWER TRANSFER
04) DAMAGE CONTROL
05) REPAIR
06) STATUS REPORT
0D) Destruct Sequence 

ESC - exit from a system

Movement and Targeting are based on a circular vector arrangement

You can specify “2” for up and to the right or “1.5” for halfway between 1 and 2.

The game supports playing with the keyboard and an optional, single-button joystick. If you prefer keyboard-only, the game maps the joystick to the H,J,M, and I keys.

Other important hotkeys:

F1 - Raise and balance both shields
F3 - Drop both shields to 0
F5 - Cancel Klaxon horn
F7 - Swivel your starship about its vertical axis
F8 - Set simulation difficulty (1-3 digits up to 128 where higher numbers are more difficult. try 37 or 03!)
ESC - Escape from any system and return to command mode

In the Long Range Scanner screen, each sector is represented by a three-digit number (e.g., 315).
The first digit is the number of Klyrons (3), the second is the number of starbases (1),
and the third is the number of planets (5).

Starbases are your lifeline — docking with them is the only way to repair damage and re-arm your ship.
Defend them at all costs. If they’re destroyed, you’ll lose… and the after-action report will be filed
by the Klyron cook or janitor (their captain is far too busy to waste time writing about human p’takh).

The all-important Destruct Sequence requires several codes:

DESTRUCT SEQUENCE ONE: 11A

DESTRUCT SEQUENCE TWO: 11A2B

DESTRUCT SEQUENCE THREE: 1B2B3

FINAL CODE: 000

Viewing the Manual

Luckily the game included a manual detailing the gameplay of this unlicensed, not-at-all-Star Trek like game. One of the neat things about Space the Ultimate Frontier is that the game disk isn’t just the program — it also contains the title art, the full game manual, and a keyboard overlay, all as separate PRG files you can load from BASIC. They aren’t available in the Internet Archive’s in-browser emulator, so if you want to see them, you’ll need to run the .d64 in VICE (or another C64 emulator) and do it yourself.

Here’s how:

load "$",8
list

You’ll see something like:

192 "THE ULT.FRONTIER" PRG
14 "SPACE PIC"        PRG
153 "SPACE DOX"        PRG
43 "SPACE KB OVERLAY" PRG
262 BLOCKS FREE.

To view the extras:

1. Title Screen

load "SPACE PIC",8
run

2. Game Manual

load "SPACE DOX",8
run

3. Keyboard Overlay

LOAD "SPACE KB OVERLAY",8
RUN

In order to view the Keyboard (KB) overlay, you will need to set up VICE to print to BMP.

🖨 Setting up VICE to print to BMP file

1. Open Printer Settings

   • Go to Settings → Peripheral Settings → Printer Settings.
   • Select Printer #4 (or another printer slot if preferred).

2. Enable Virtual and IEC Devices

   • Go to Settings → Peripheral Settings.
   • Check Enable virtual devices.
   • Check Enable IEC device.

3. Configure Printer #4

   • Emulation type: File system
   • Device #4 printer text device: path to your output file/directory (e.g. /home/you/vice_printouts/manual.bmp)
   • Printer driver: MPS803 (reliable for graphics/text mix)
   • Output type: Graphics
   • Output file format: BMP
   • Form feed on close: ✅ (ensures the BMP finalizes correctly)

4. Save Settings

   • Go to Settings → Save current settings so the printer setup is remembered.

5. Print from the C64

   • In the program, choose the “print” function.
   • The BMP file will appear at your chosen path when printing completes.

A great, C64 version of a mainframe classic

Space the Ultimate Frontier is a shiny, C64/C128 take on the classic “Star Trek” game that first appeared on the Sigma 7 mainframe at the University of California, Irvine in 1971. That game, written in BASIC, spread and soon appeared on systems from the PDP-10 to the HP 2000 time-sharing system.

You can still get a taste of the mainframe glory days by checking out the 1970s C version that is still available in the bsdgames package.

sudo apt update
sudo apt install bsdgames
trek

I’m sure that was more fun to play on a teletype in a big expensive computing center. The C64 version really brings the game to life with smooth, simple graphics and Commodore’s famously decent sound chip. I love that this game was an implementation of a Unix mainframe classic that was already almost 20 years old when it was released.

Links and stuff

YouTube longplay video (good preservation demo but not as much fun as playing it)

🖖 You can check out the pdf of the manual that I uploaded to the Internet Archive
Internet Archive – STUF Manual Scanned manual for Space: The Ultimate Frontier (C64/C128), with PDF download.

archive.org/details/space-the-ultimate-frontier-manual/Space-the-Ultimate-Frontier-manual.pdf

Conclusion

This game has a special place in my heart but nostalgia aside, it packs a lot of gameplay into a tiny memory footprint. It has definitely earned a place in my boredom-battling games kit!

A little bonus in case you want to hear the C64 SID chip sing!

🖖 If you want even more Star Trek fun, check out my Borgify script post and start borgifying those annoying work emails today!

Have a fond memory of this or other great Commodore games (Space Taxi anyone)? A battle story? I’d love to hear about it. Email me: feedback@adminjitsu.com