The release date for Bare Naked Space Warp for the TRS-80 Color Computer has been announced for April 15, 2026.
SPACE WARP: A GAME FORTY YEARS IN THE MAKING
Before I owned a computer, I played one.
The computer club in 7th grade had three TRS-80 Model I machines, and we loaded them all from the same cassette. The game was called Space Warp, a real-time Star Trek battle simulation written by sixteen-year-old Josh Lavinsky, and published by Personal Software in 1980. One kid guided the ship with arrow keys. Another entered commands on the numeric keypad: warp coordinates, phaser angles, shield levels. It was cooperative by necessity because we shared the same keyboard, and the effect was pure Star Trek. A helmsman and a commander, barking orders over a glowing phosphor screen.
I was twelve. It was my first computer game.
Eventually I got my own machine, a TRS-80 Color Computer, the CoCo. The Motorola 6809 inside it is the most elegant 8-bit CPUs ever designed. But the software never caught up to the silicon, and I never wrote the game I wanted to write for it.
Forty years and a career in software development later, I went back.
Space Warp is a from-scratch reimplementation of that original game, built for the TRS-80 Color Computer using a custom programming language I developed with Claude, Anthropic's AI coding assistant. The entire game runs in about 28 kilobytes. On a machine from 1980 with less memory than a single modern app icon.
The graphics use NTSC artifact coloring, a technique that coaxes four colors out of a monochrome framebuffer by exploiting how old televisions decode the signal. Your ship glows blue. Enemy Jovians burn red. Maser beams streak across a field of colored stars. It looks like nothing else because it is nothing else. Every pixel plotted by hand, every keystroke read directly from the hardware. No operating system. No libraries. No safety net.
The Jovians have DNA. Each enemy ship carries a four-byte genome that controls its aggression, pilot skill, speed, and appearance. Aggressive Jovians charge to point-blank range. Fearful ones orbit at distance and snipe. Skilled pilots thread through star fields while clumsy ones blunder into obstacles. They get angry when you kill their wingmates. They get scared when they're wounded. No two Jovians look or behave alike.
Combat has weight. Masers are your primary weapon: fast, direct, reliable. Missiles are the finisher: homing, devastating, limited. Your deflector shields absorb hits but degrade under sustained fire. Below 40%, damage bleeds through to your ship's systems. Engines, warp drive, scanners, weapons. When all five systems fail, you're done. Dock at a starbase to repair, but you'll have to lower your shields first. And the Jovians are attacking those bases too.
This game was built in 24 days by a long time software veteran and an AI that never sleeps. The development language, Bare Naked Forth, was written from scratch for this project. The cross-compiler, the kernel, the tutorial series, the emulator toolchain, the screen-capture debugging system: all built as we went, each tool earning its place.
The source code will be available on GitHub. The game is free, but we gladly accept donations. Money is love.
The original Space Warp for the TRS-80 Model 1 fit into into 4,096 bytes of Z-80 assembly code. I still don't know how that was done, but with a modern toolchain and an AI partner, we are almost there.
Space Warp releases April 15, 2026. Download it for your CoCo. Emulate it using XRoar or just play in your browser.
Built with Bare Naked Forth and Claude Code.