I apparently have Spacewar for Unix?

At 07:33 AM 10/16/2019, John Foust via cctalk wrote: From: Bob Bane <jbane at gst.com> To: John Foust <jfoust at threedee.com> Subject: Re: I apparently have Spacewar for Unix? Date: Wed, 16 Oct 2019 18:09:23 +0000 Message-ID: <MN2PR19MB2960AD756F4BD0C3522FCAF4B7920 at MN2PR19MB2960.namprd19.prod.outlook.com> References: <bea063e4-553e-4535-8bfd-82d9ce0e95db at BY2NAM05FT027.eop-nam05.prod.protection.outlook.com> In-Reply-To: <bea063e4-553e-4535-8bfd-82d9ce0e95db at BY2NAM05FT027.eop-nam05.prod.protection.outlook.com> Yep, that's mine. There was a tradition in the Maryland CS department at the time that right after your thesis topic was approved, you would go off and do something completely unrelated for a bit, before going into dissertation coding mode. We had just gotten several new Sun workstations - 68000 CPU, monochrome display with bitblt hardware. I spent the summer writing a 4-player spacewar game for it. The program did all sorts of unportable horrible things in the name of speed: * Ships could point in 256 directions - each ship had 256 pre-computed rotated pictures, one for each angle * There were also 256 entry tables for ship thrust and bomb velocity change * Orbital calculations were done in assembler, to force single precision floating point All the controls were on the keyboard; it was barely possible to get four people's hands on at a time. There was no published interface to get keyrise/keyfall, but the ring buffer for key events was readable, so the program monitored its contents and swiped the key codes as they appeared. Ships could be user-created - each ship design was a file of 31 lines, of 31 characters where '*' was a lit pixel and '.' was a thruster pixel (lit when the engine was running). A program read the ship design files and pre-computed the rotated ship pictures. Stuff like the strength of gravity, power of ship engines, speed of repeat firing for bombs, etc. were all set in a parameter file, so you could have slow, majestic orbits, or fast ones, or no gravity at all. Thanks for letting me know this was found - I might still have a copy in my ancient archives, but this is a welcome refresh. - Bob