11 May
2021
11 May
'21
2 a.m.
Thanks Mattis - watching an AR11 making that
oscilloscope display brings back a lot of
memories from my PDP-11 programming days. Had
heard of spacewar in 1980, but was more
interested in playing around displaying data on
screen of a scope. One of my jobs was to clean
up electrophysiology data for publication and
that meant removing noise in signal so had a
joystick system which could move and click on
point on screen I wanted deleted. 11/34 was fast
enough that we had an EE summer student create a
dot matrix character set so we could put captions
on our oscilloscope images. Of course, only way
of getting hard copies of those was with an oscilloscope Polaroid camera.
Looking at the printouts that you're dealing
with, I had a hard time making out some of the
characters. Can see individual dots in a number
of the characters and haven't found any OCR in
past that works well on them. Had my MSc thesis
printed on and IBM lineprinter and looks good
from afar but couldn't get any OCR program to
digitize it properly. At least the spacewar code is relatively short!
Boris Gimbarzevsky
Today I finally got the SPACEWAR version for PDP-11/10
running again on my
PDP-11/05 with AR11 board. I played a couple of rounds together with my
daughter. She was better than me. Quite hard game IMHO.
https://youtu.be/fTiHRAKjyho
Bill Seiler and Larry Bryant wrote this version in 1974 and submitted it to
DECUS. It was believed to have been lost to history. But Bill had saved the
printouts from the PAL11 assembler. He sent me scans of these printouts as
pdf files. I then transcribed it into source files and iterated several
times in SimH to get a clean build and link. I got some help from people
here doing OCR on some files. But the lines mostly confused the OCR process
so a lot of errors was introduced. It turned out that it was easier to just
transcribe the whole lot by hand than finding and correcting errors.
The AR11 is somewhat different to the AD01 and AA11 that Bill and Larry
used. AA11 has a 12 bit 2???s complement D/A while the AR11 is only 10 bits
and not 2???s complement. I did some patches and eventually got everything
right.
I also connected a couple of analogue joysticks. The fire button is just
short ciruiting the viper of the potentiometer to the 5V supply lead. The
screen is a HP1332A vector screen.
All the transcribed code, AR11 patches and build instructions are available
on github. https://github.com/MattisLind/SPACEWAR
It should be possible to adapt it to orher types of A/D and D/A hardware if
anyone wishes to do so. However the gameplay might be harder when running
on a faster PDP-11?
Have fun!
/Mattis