13 Apr
2024
13 Apr
'24
11:24 p.m.
Plato experience is still active including the games at https://www.cyber1.org/
Regards,
Tarek Hoteit
AI Consultant, PhD
+1 360-838-3675
https://tarek.computer
INFOCOM AI LLC - https://infocom.ai
On Apr 13, 2024, at 10:20, Paul Koning via cctalk
<cctalk(a)classiccmp.org> wrote:
On Apr 12, 2024, at 9:49 PM, ben via cctalk
<cctalk(a)classiccmp.org> wrote:
On 2024-04-12 7:23 p.m., Paul Koning via cctalk wrote:
But too slow I suspect to run a game like spacewar.
PLATO was the system where a whole lot of early games first appeared, especially
multi-player games. Among them were any number of variations of "Star Trek"
inspired ones. While you couldn't refresh a screen full of space ships in motion as
fast as you can on a dedicated graphics engine, it was certainly acceptable for the
players. And a simpler two-ship game like the original spacewar would work even better,
because you'd only need a couple of operations per refresh -- on the classic terminal,
12 output words at 60 per second, so 200 ms per refresh. Not quite "full
motion" but close.
paul
> On
Apr 12, 2024, at 5:54 PM, CAREY SCHUG via cctalk <cctalk(a)classiccmp.org> wrote:
>
> ...
> my favorite terminal 3190 that was neon gas, so monochrome, but could take 5
addresses, and flip between 62 lines of 160 characters (always there), to 4 terminals of
62x80 any two visible at a time, or 4 terminals of 31x160 characters, any 2 visible at a
time, or 4 terminals of 31x80 all visible at once. when given a choice, my new boss was
surprised that I chose that instead of the color 3279 with graphics that everybody else
wanted. Great for running virtual systems...
Sounds like the plasma panel displays that were invented for the PLATO system, by
Don Bitzer and a few others, at the U of Illinois. Inherent memory: if you lit a pixel it
would stay lit, to turn it off you'd feed it a pulse of the opposite polarity. So it
was a great way to do 512x512 bitmap graphics with very modest complexity, no refresh
memory needed.
paul