15 Oct
2019
15 Oct
'19
7:51 a.m.
While dumping lispm tapes, I found one with a label saying "Read it into DRAL"
(may be "DRAC"?) "and sent a message to cap's bboard saying where it
can be found. -Bob?. There was another paper label that had fallen off. What I think is
the label in question was later found in the bottom of the box, a strip of masking tape
saying ?SPACEWAR FOR VAX (Unix?)?. The contents are a 136KB tar archive containing source
to a program called ?orbit?, all files are dated August 22nd, 1983.
The README file follows:
??
To install orbit:
1. Do a 'make all'.
2. Make sure the directories on the path /usr/games/lib/orbit/*
all exist and are writable by you (except /usr, of course).
3. Do a 'make install'.
This should work with no changes on Berkeley 4.2, unless the
structure for the console keyboard buffer has been changed.
The crock that reads the up-down codes here should be changed
to use the real ROM-table hooks, anyway. Unfortunately, all
that nice stuff is in protected memory.
Enjoy!
- Bob Bane (bane.umcp-cs at UDel-Relay)
??
Does anyone know what this is? The (gzipped) tar file is at
https://www.bogodyne.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/10/orbit.tar.gz
<https://www.bogodyne.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/10/orbit.tar.gz>
15 Oct
15 Oct
11:57 a.m.
On Tue, Oct 15, 2019 at 09:51:02AM -0500, Daniel Seagraves via cctalk wrote:
While dumping lispm tapes, I found one with a label
saying "Read it
into DRAL" (may be "DRAC"?) "and sent a message to cap's bboard
saying where it can be found. -Bob?. There was another paper label
that had fallen off. What I think is the label in question was later
found in the bottom of the box, a strip of masking tape saying
?SPACEWAR FOR VAX (Unix?)?. The contents are a 136KB tar archive
containing source to a program called ?orbit?, all files are dated
August 22nd, 1983.
I unpacked it. The beginning of orbit.man says:
--------------------
.SH NAME
orbit \- Spacewar on the Sun
.SH SYNOPSIS
.B
orbit <players>
.PP
.B
orbit <ship1name> ... [-O <optionfile>]
.SH DESCRIPTION
The classic game of interplanetary death and destruction.
Mostly written in C; an assembler package does fast single-precision
floating-point for orbital calculations and collision detection.
.PP
Most of the game's basic parameters are changeable;
parameter sets can be saved and reloaded from option files.
If the file .orbitrc exists in your
--------------------
and the fp.s file looks to me like a Motorola assembler, but I may be
wrong. In main.c there are references to something like graphics
routines making use of framebuffer. The structure of filesystem
mentioned in Makefile hints towards Unix-like system.
I would say, after very quick looking, it is rather for SunOS, not for
anything DEC-made.
I wonder if others may come to different conclusions?
--
Regards,
Tomasz Rola
--
** A C programmer asked whether computer had Buddha's nature. **
** As the answer, master did "rm -rif" on the programmer's home **
** directory. And then the C programmer became enlightened... **
** **
** Tomasz Rola mailto:tomasz_rola at bigfoot.com **
12:26 p.m.
Sun
On Tue, Oct 15, 2019 at 8:57 PM Tomasz Rola via cctalk <
cctalk at classiccmp.org> wrote:
On Tue, Oct 15, 2019 at 09:51:02AM -0500, Daniel
Seagraves via cctalk
wrote:
While dumping lispm tapes, I found one with a
label saying "Read it
into DRAL" (may be "DRAC"?) "and sent a message to cap's bboard
saying where it can be found. -Bob?. There was another paper label
that had fallen off. What I think is the label in question was later
found in the bottom of the box, a strip of masking tape saying
?SPACEWAR FOR VAX (Unix?)?. The contents are a 136KB tar archive
containing source to a program called ?orbit?, all files are dated
August 22nd, 1983.
I unpacked it. The beginning of orbit.man says:
--------------------
.SH NAME
orbit \- Spacewar on the Sun
.SH SYNOPSIS
.B
orbit <players>
.PP
.B
orbit <ship1name> ... [-O <optionfile>]
.SH DESCRIPTION
The classic game of interplanetary death and destruction.
Mostly written in C; an assembler package does fast single-precision
floating-point for orbital calculations and collision detection.
.PP
Most of the game's basic parameters are changeable;
parameter sets can be saved and reloaded from option files.
If the file .orbitrc exists in your
--------------------
and the fp.s file looks to me like a Motorola assembler, but I may be
wrong. In main.c there are references to something like graphics
routines making use of framebuffer. The structure of filesystem
mentioned in Makefile hints towards Unix-like system.
I would say, after very quick looking, it is rather for SunOS, not for
anything DEC-made.
I wonder if others may come to different conclusions?
--
Regards,
Tomasz Rola
--
** A C programmer asked whether computer had Buddha's nature. **
** As the answer, master did "rm -rif" on the programmer's home **
** directory. And then the C programmer became enlightened... **
** **
** Tomasz Rola mailto:tomasz_rola at bigfoot.com **
12:29 p.m.
At 01:57 PM 10/15/2019, Tomasz Rola via cctalk wrote:
I would say, after very quick looking, it is rather for
SunOS, not for
anything DEC-made. I wonder if others may come to different conclusions?
Have you tried googling for Bob Nane of U-Maryland? He wrote a few papers.
Last tracks I saw for him were in 2004 at GST in Greenbelt, MD.
Bob Bane <bane at gst.com> or <bob.bane at gst.com>
- John
6:06 p.m.
On Tue, Oct 15, 2019 at 02:29:39PM -0500, John Foust via cctalk wrote:
At 01:57 PM 10/15/2019, Tomasz Rola via cctalk wrote:
I made some searches on double duck, after you asked. There is not so
much info and what is there is not helpful. I found one BBane a chess
player (but borne in 1981), one who talks about afterlife and another
one who was police chief in Paxton IL, but two years ago mayor let him
go because the chief gave speed ticket to one of mayor's
employees. BTW, Paxton is full of life, if I am to believe their local
news - speed chases, dead guys in wrecked cars (those were not running
away, if I am correct), oh my.
I have no idea what to make of this :-)
After consulting wikipedia, the date on the files (Aug 22, 1983) are
before release of SunOS 1.0 (Nov 1983) and after SunOS 0.7 (1982).
--
Regards,
Tomasz Rola
--
** A C programmer asked whether computer had Buddha's nature. **
** As the answer, master did "rm -rif" on the programmer's home **
** directory. And then the C programmer became enlightened... **
** **
** Tomasz Rola mailto:tomasz_rola at bigfoot.com **
I would say, after very quick looking, it is
rather for SunOS, not for
anything DEC-made. I wonder if others may come to different conclusions?
Have you tried googling for Bob Nane of U-Maryland? He wrote a few papers.
Last tracks I saw for him were in 2004 at GST in Greenbelt, MD.
Bob Bane <bane at gst.com> or <bob.bane at gst.com> 
16 Oct
16 Oct
5 a.m.
On Tue, Oct 15, 2019 at 09:51:02AM -0500, Daniel Seagraves via cctalk wrote:
Does anyone know what this is?
Very interesting find. I can see updown.c #includes sunromvec.h, which I
believe is a Sun Microsystems include. Checking a copy of that file that's
available online, some of the definitions used (eg v_Keybuf) suggest that
the code dates from around the time period of the Sun-1 (as Tomasz Rola
suggested).
Perhaps someone on the TUHS list[1] can shed more light on it?
[1] https://minnie.tuhs.org/mailman/listinfo/tuhs
Cheers, MJ
--
Michael-John Turner * mj at mjturner.net * http://mjturner.net/
11:15 a.m.
At 07:33 AM 10/16/2019, John Foust via cctalk wrote:
At 07:00 AM 10/16/2019, you 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
Perhaps someone on the TUHS list[1] can shed more
light on it?
I emailed Bane last night at the addresses I found, and they did not
immediately bounce, FWIW.
1675
days inactive
1676
days old
7 comments
5 participants
participants (5)
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dseagrav＠lunar-tokyo.net -
edcross＠gmail.com -
jfoust＠threedee.com -
mj＠mjturner.net -
rtomek＠ceti.pl