About Space Trader — Web Edition
This site is a free, browser-based remake of Space Trader, the Palm OS classic by Pieter Spronck. This page is the story: what the original was, what this remake keeps faithful, and what it changes. If you just want to play, the game is here — and the getting-started guide will make your first hour profitable.
The Palm OS original (2000)
Pieter Spronck released Space Trader for Palm OS in 2000, free of charge and open-sourced under the GPL. On a pocket organizer's tiny square screen it compressed a whole genre — the buy-low-sell-high arbitrage of Taipan! and the trade-and-fight galaxy of Elite — into something you could play one-handed in a waiting room: start with 1,000 credits and a small ship, work the price spreads across 120 star systems, survive pirates and police, and retire by buying your own moon in the Utopia system.
It became one of the best-loved games on the platform, and its clean, fully published design — every good, ship, government, and price rule laid out in data tables — has invited ports and remakes on one platform after another ever since Palm itself faded.
What this remake preserves
The economy is the original's economy. The same 10 trade goods — water, furs, food, ore, games, firearms, medicine, machines, narcotics, and robots — with their real production and usage tech thresholds, base prices, and increments; the same crisis, resource, and wanted-good price multipliers; the same 120 system names governed by the same 17 political systems across 8 tech levels.
The hardware is the original's hardware: all 10 hulls from the Flea to the Wasp with their original cargo bays, slots, fuel tanks, and prices, traded in at the classic 75%. So are the consequences: the police record scale from Psychopath to Hero, the combat reputation from Harmless to Elite, contraband law, wormholes, five difficulty levels from Beginner to Impossible — and the bank's merciless 10%-per-day loan. This is a clean-room tribute built from the original's published data tables and mechanics.
What this remake changes
Mostly the parts a Palm handheld could never do. The interface is a modern console — responsive down to a phone screen, with warp and docking animations, a skippable three-minute flight tutorial, a milestone ladder that teaches the trading loop, and market dots and chart halos that surface the price gradients veterans used to keep in their heads. The game auto-saves to your browser every time you dock.
Signing in with a free En Dash account is optional and adds cloud saves across devices plus a Hall of Fame for retired commanders. The remake also carries a first set of the original's special events — the Japori medicine run, the hunt for the stolen Dragonfly, and an evening with Captain Conrad — with more of the classic's event chains as natural territory to grow into.
Free, in the browser, no signup
The whole game runs in any modern browser, desktop or mobile, with no install, no account, no payment, and no ads. It ships as a single self-contained page and saves to plain browser storage, so a complete career — first Gnat to moon deed — costs exactly nothing and asks for nothing.
Who built it
Space Trader — Web Edition is built and run by En Dash in the same spirit as the original: no frameworks, no runtime dependencies, one HTML file for the game and a small plain-Node server around it. It is an independent fan tribute to Pieter Spronck's design and is not affiliated with or endorsed by him. Questions are answered directly in the FAQ, and strategy lives in the guide.