13 Apr
2024
13 Apr
'24
5:44 p.m.
On 4/13/24 12:20, Paul Koning via cctalk wrote:
I cannot count how many hours I spend on the Plato IV terminal at our local
university playing
Empire and Dogfight - I was in high school at the time...
--tom
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