Star Trek: Borg – Remastered | Hacker News Reader

Star Trek: Borg – Remastered

borgremastered.com

133 pointsCharlesW46 comments

Off-topic from the site, but, Borg related:

If you're looking for a good story that provides a much better finale of Borg than Star Trek TNG/VOY/Picard ever provided, I highly recommend reading the Star Trek Destiny trilogy[1]

Books to read:

Gods of Night

Mere Mortals

Lost Souls

[1] https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/Star_Trek:_Destiny

Yes, the Star Trek Destiny trilogy is really good, unfortunately for me that were some of the first Star Trek books I read, now all the others seem just not as good. Two days ago I started Federation by Judith and Garfield Reeves-Stevens, which was advertised to me as the better "StarTrek Generations", so far it reads pretty good.

Thanks for sharing! Looks super interesting. I’ll check it out.

Nice, even free.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Star_Trek:_Borg

This was such a strange and janky game when it came out, the hitboxes for clicking were so unreliable even when you knew what you wanted to do.

It was a shame, because the game was a fascinating idea and well written.

The Klingon one was awesome. This one has Q though.

It is truly wild how much quality content the franchise was able to produce in the 90’s.

Starfleet Command and Armada are some of my favorite games even today.

I'd love another Star Trek: Armada

Strategy game and Star Trek? Hell yeah

Star Trek Bridge Commander is the pinnacle of not only Trek games but space games as a whole.

I like that people are using new tools to not only preserve but improve things from the past.

One note, though, is that it'd be really nice if people stopped trying to save bandwidth by chopping audio bitrates so much. I don't even have the speakers turned up and it's obvious. It's a bit silly to care about HD quality video yet kill the audio with 128 kbps mp3 quality audio.

The audio is direct from the source. Are their tools to automatically improve the audio like the video?

Would be great to have the option to download this in full before the C&D hits.

> DISCLAIMER: BorgRemastered.com is a fan preservation project; it was created for experimentation, education & research, is completely nonprofit, and should be considered fair use as stated in the Copyright Act of 1976, 17 U.S.C. section 107. It is not an official product and it should not be sold nor bought. BorgRemastered.com is intended for free private use and any sale or for-profit use is prohibited.

from: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_jBYkjBF8Zw

nothing about that will stop a cease and desist.

I didn't say it did, just pointing out the attempt to preempt

CBS can still potentially send a cease and desist letter. Star Trek Stage 9 got shutdown even though it was clearly labelled as a non commercial and generated no revenue.

There was speculation because the Star Trek: Bridge Crew DLC was coming out which CBS was afraid that Stage 9 would outclass it, but who knows what goes on in the minds of CBS lawyers.

Good thing about it is that the team that worked on Stage 9 moved onto a recreation of the Orville now.

> Good thing about it is that the team that worked on Stage 9 moved onto a recreation of the Orville now.

They did a stellar job on this (which makes me double-plus pissed at CBS, knowing how good their Enterprise-D recreation could've been). Unfortunately, Seth MacFarlane seems to be doing less than stellar job at keeping the Orville going for now.

Season 3 ooses depression from every pore ...not sure it that make co.plete sense but yeah it was tough to watch

It felt like S3 forgot it was a comedy, and it tried too hard to be Real Trek. (Not to mention I kind of hate the crew now for what they did to Gordon in that time travel episode.)

Yeah, IMO S2 had the right balance of comedy-to-drama, being a little more light-hearted Real Trek. A lifeline in times where we had no proper Trek.

Lifting an entire game could in no way be considered fair use. That will never pass.

Discussed previously: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18673076

That is about the anti-circumvention clause of the DMCA, not fair use.

While true, Star Trek does have some history of tolerating fan productions to a certain extent. This probably wouldn't qualify but they tolerate more than average.

How come BSD trek and the rest of the implementations (several even under PD) never got an issue?

A niche mainframe game from 1971, and its successors like BSD Trek, were flying way below the radar of any lawyers back then. Even through the early/mid-80's, developers took great liberties with IP and largely got away with it. (Regard the "Prisoner" game from 1980 [1].)

I remember buying a C64 port of Trek off the shelf at Target in the mid-80s which was clearly not licensed. I don't think anyone could get away with that today. :)

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Prisoner_(video_game)#Diff...

EGA Trek for DOS got a sternly-worded letter. Later versions had “USS Lexington” fighting the “Mongols”, rather than the Enterprise and Klingons.

Wasn't the Klingons some reminiscence of Mongols in the original encounter? They had like cliché Mongol beards, and were classic Star Trek "human"-aliens with like 12 toes or something they never showed anyways.

The ol' hug of death. Or perhaps a C&D?

edit It loaded. Definitely hug of death

I'm not sure its truly getting hugged to death.. these video assets are pretty large. They are 1440p and 282MB for 5 mins, e.g: https://borgremastered.com/assets/vids/001c_pass_1440p.mp4

This is such a great site, and game!

Thanks to whoever made this - the game oozes 90s / 00s and you've captured it perfectly!

Sounds like The Spoony One needs to re-do his review from the dawn of time

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qqRfjRKHh-g

Fellow junkball fan? He just reviewed this game, for context.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3SbbS0MSA0U

Slightly off topic, but not by much, question. Is it possible, with the recent AI advancements, to create 16:9 4K versions of TOS, TNG, DS9, VOY?

Having seen the AI up scaled versions of DS9, I would be surprised if that ends up being something I want to watch. I definitely don't see the point of changing the aspect ratio.

The point would be to get more screen estate and hence a more immersive experience. It's why The Shield was later released in widescreen despite originally being cropped for 4:3. Similarly there's a non-matted full-frame video from Jurassic Park and it's a whole different experience because you see so much more. AI would allow generative fill to create the environment and truly experience the vast space or see the environment even in close-ups. The counter argument would be that frame and composition matter.

Something of note though is that things are shot for the aspect ratio they're shooting for. I'm guessing The Shield was intentionally shot with both Widescreen and 4:3 in mind if that happened, because it's pretty common to look through your viewfinder as a cinematographer, see that there's a boom in the shot, but it's outside of the matte and proceed with filming.

If we were to trust AI to do this, we'd need to build models specifically for this, with a way to give context to the rest of the set for the scene in question. From a technical perspective, I find the concept interesting, but from a practical sense, the amount of energy and time required to do this is almost a non-starter, and in doing this, we'd be going beyond the director's intent for the work at hand, which makes a transformative interpretation a degree or two removed from the intent of the director and production team.

I don't know about 4k, but I think a lot of the newer stuff is on bluray.

Only TOS and TNG. They lost buckets of money allegedly doing it for TNG because nobody bought it. That put plans to do the same for DS9 and VOY on ice

ENT I think was shot at 1080P at the very least and Lower Decks/Disco/Picard/etc are all probably 4K at least

My understanding is that TOS and TNG were shot on film and the 1080p versions aren't upscaled but are actually rescanned from the film. TNG supposedly had to basically be re-edited from the original footage after rescanning, but not sure about TOS.

That method wouldn't be possible for DS9 or Voyager as both of those shows were shot digitally at 480p. I remember hearing that there's been some community work that upscales DS9 to 1080p using neural networks, but haven't really been able to find anything concrete about that.

ExtremeTech has a few articles about upscaling DS9 and I think the work has been ongoing for a few years now. Some of the examples are really good but the techniques and technology is changing as the author is working and maybe I'm misremembering but I think the GPU time was measured in months to over a year for the whole series to be upscaled.

This is great, thanks for making the effort!

Doesn't seem to load...

This is awesome, thank you!

Now I'm curious about other games.

ScummVM and its backgrounds could be a relatively easy target. And on the opposite end would be using NES Mario gameplay as input and processing that real time to get consistently animated high definition results.

Are there any other remastering projects like this?

The Sierra Adventures used vector graphics, so it's possible to render them in higher resolutions: https://youtu.be/sclZDCjUVvI?si=voV4oOiiFdbGzA75&t=294

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