‘Star Trek’ Cd-Rom Beams Knowledge

Trekked out.

And can you blame me? After all the television series, the motion pictures, the video games, the screen savers, the action figures, the cartoon shows, the comics, the books-on-tape, the biographies of William Shatner … well, it would take an interactive breakthrough of galactic proportions to shake me from this “Star Trek”-induced stupor.

Then, out of this manic miasma of marketing, along comes the CDROM “Star Trek Omnipedia”: everything you’ve ever wanted to know about the phenomenon, and far more.

The history, the mystery, the fables, the lore are all here, and in alphabetical order, from “A&A Officer” (Lt. Carolyn Palamas was archaelogy and anthropology specialist on the USS Enterprise when it visited planet Pollux IV on stardate 2267) to “Zylo Eggs.”

Fanatics will not be put off by the small type and tiny icons that direct the action, and there are enough cool graphics along with the reams of text material to liven up the research. I especially like the fashion sketches of Starfleet uniforms and the look of Tantalus rehab colony’s symbol badge, a Woodstockian rendering of a hand and a dove.

It’s easy to sink under the spell of the Enterprise here: Actress Majel Barrett’s familiar tones provide the “official” voice of the Federation computer, and Mark Lenard’s familiar Vulcan intonation narrates the five historical overviews, including the weird prognostications of “The History of the Future” (hint: the terrible eugenics wars end in 1996).

The completeness of this program rivals the best CD-ROM disc-based real-world encyclopedia, including Compton’s and Microsoft’s sensational “Encarta” series. The publisher, Simon & Schuster Interactive, says more than 6,000 indexed entries (virtually all of them culled from previously published books on “Star Trek” history) are on the disc, plus 2,000 full-color photos and more than 100 QuickTime movies and illustrations. “Omnipedia” owners are also promised free CD-ROM updates later this year that are scheduled to incorporate data from the most recent season of “Star Trek Deep Space Nine,” the debut season of Paramount’s “Star Trek Voyager” series, and references to the latest Paramount movie, “Star Trek Generations.”“Omnipedia,” just released for Macintosh and PC systems and priced at about $50, is the latest - and certainly not the last - in a deluge of multimedia-ware created to cash in on Trekkie mania. June brought “Star Trek: The Next Generation, a Final Unity,” a role-playing adventure with an instruction manual that would test the concentration of a neurosurgeon. Earlier this year Simon & Schuster offered “Star Trek: The Next Generation, Interactive Technical Manual,” which was as entertaining (for a non-Trekkie, admittedly) as the yule log.And there’s more to come: MacPlay is set to release by Christmas a boxed-set called “Star Trek: Judgment Rites,” which includes a CD-ROM of the game, a CD-ROM video on the making of the game, and a collector’s pin, all bound in “exclusive” gold foil.