Stay at Home Edition: Ironic Computer Space Simulator (DEC PDP-1, 2016)
RetroChallenge 2016/10: Programming a 60 fps video game for early 1960s hardware.
After all the software archeology on Spacewar! (see below) I was keen to try some programming for the DEC PDP-1 of my own. What about doing my own game? After all, I knew my way pretty well around the PDP-1. So I picked the PDP-1 for the second edition of RetroChallenge 2016 — and managed to write a classic video game running on early 1960s hardware at 60 frames per second!
(No April Fool’s Day Hoax!)
Admittedly, I picked a game, which I knew would fit well the constraints of this particular machine, and I was standing on the shoulders of giants who did Spacewar!, like Steve Russell, Dan Edwards and Peter Samson. More so, the game, I picked, was heavily inspired by Spacewar!, which originated on the PDP-1, so it wasn’t much of a surprise that it should fairly conform to the capabilities of that particular machine. So, closing a never existing circle by a full 360° turn and a somewhat ironic twist in computer history, I ported the very first coin operated video game back to the computer, which inspired it in the first place. Ironically also, because “Computer Space”, despite its cheerful name, doesn’t feature a computer at all, but is rather a complex pattern generator in 74xx-series TTL logic, which we now had to simulate on hardware, which predated its TTL electronics by a decade. And, as a bonus, there’s now a classic single player shooter for the DEC PDP-1. (Eventually, the program ran on the real machine at the CHM.)