Analogue Releases Video Game From 1962 On the Pocket (theverge.com) 24
An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Verge: Today, Analogue announced that it's launching Spacewar!, a game originally designed for the PDP-1 minicomputer that predates Pong by a full decade, on the Pocket as a part of its larger strategy to bring pioneering video games into the modern era. The original Spacewar! was created in 1962 by a cadre of engineers led by Steve Russell at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Using a PDP-1 minicomputer and a 1024 x 1024 pixel CRT display, Russell and his colleagues programmed a game in which two spacecraft duke it out in the gravitational well of a star. Two controllers were created for the game featuring switches for maneuvering and buttons that were designed to be quiet when pressed so your opponent couldn't hear when you were firing missiles.
To bring Spacewar! to the Analogue Pocket, Spacemen3, a third-party developer, used the source code from the PDP-1 computer and Spacewar! itself, both of which are in the public domain, alongside OpenFPGA software. Emulating 60-year-old software came with some interesting challenges. "The PDP-1 had some unique characteristics about it, having a 1024x1024 vector display with a unique way of generating the image," said Analogue CEO Chris Taber in an email to The Verge. "It was a bit tricky to accommodate this." Alex Cranz of The Verge had the opportunity to play Spacewar!: "Spacewar! looks a little different on the Analogue Pocket. Lines are crisp and clean with none of the ethereal glow the original green CRT provided. The AI for your opponent is nonexistent, but there's still something really fun about accelerating toward a star and then using its gravity to whip around it and take out another ship. Decades later, you still really feel like you're fighting some war in space."
To bring Spacewar! to the Analogue Pocket, Spacemen3, a third-party developer, used the source code from the PDP-1 computer and Spacewar! itself, both of which are in the public domain, alongside OpenFPGA software. Emulating 60-year-old software came with some interesting challenges. "The PDP-1 had some unique characteristics about it, having a 1024x1024 vector display with a unique way of generating the image," said Analogue CEO Chris Taber in an email to The Verge. "It was a bit tricky to accommodate this." Alex Cranz of The Verge had the opportunity to play Spacewar!: "Spacewar! looks a little different on the Analogue Pocket. Lines are crisp and clean with none of the ethereal glow the original green CRT provided. The AI for your opponent is nonexistent, but there's still something really fun about accelerating toward a star and then using its gravity to whip around it and take out another ship. Decades later, you still really feel like you're fighting some war in space."
SpaceWar! has been for ages on MiSTer FPGA (Score:3)
Re: SpaceWar! has been for ages on MiSTer FPGA (Score:2)
So the fuck what, its been on the pdp since 1962
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I'm surprised nobody has linked to the online version: https://www.masswerk.at/spacewar/ [masswerk.at]
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I found this too. Good old Github.
https://gist.github.com/Jonnie... [github.com]
No pixels! (Score:5, Informative)
Some of you may be too young to remember vector displays but there are no pixels. Instead of the CRT's electron beam scanning from left to right, activating where a pixel should be, the electron beam scans from one position on the screen to another activating to draw a line. The game had a 1024x1024 matrix of starting and ending positions but the lines drawn between them were smooth analog lines.
Other examples include the classic game Asteroids.
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Tempest was mine. One of my go-to games whenever I'm in the MAME mode.
Re:No pixels! (Score:4, Interesting)
A megapixel in 1962? Maybe at NASA or DoD... (Score:5, Informative)
Yup, this was a vector display with no scan lines or pixels. A 1024 by 1024 pixel display requires a megabit of memory, which might have been possible in 1962 but would have required NASA or DoD level budgets to achieve.
For a vector display, you just need a couple of digital to analog converters to drive the horizontal and vertical deflection of the CRT directly. Back then, you could build those using an R-2R ladder. The DACs are driven by line generating hardware that gets its data from a "display list" of the various vectors to be displayed. The display list fits in a much smaller amount of memory than would be required for a full bitmap, and its access speed requirements are relaxed as well.
The light pen was invented for use with vector displays because it could actually pick out which vector was being displayed at any particular moment. Instead of triggering at a particular horizontal position on a particular scan line, it would trigger on the particular vector being processed by the display list. If the light pen wasn't touching a glowing vector on the screen, the light pen wouldn't trigger at all. If you wanted to be able to indicate an arbitrary place on the screen using a light pen, the software had to search for it by drawing something like expanding boxes.
Vector displays allowed high resolution graphics with real-time interactivity long before the PC era with its slow, low-resolution graphical displays. They had some neat features too. If you had too many vectors in your display list, it would just slow down the refresh rate. The image on the CRT would flicker, but it would still show everything.
Vector displays live on in laser/galvanometer setups.
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Only if you're using a whole byte to encode one pixel? If you use 1 bit per pixel, a 1024x1024 pixel display requires 128Kb. That's still an enormous amount of RAM by 1962 standards given that LSI and microchips had only been around for a couple of years at that point.
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Re: No pixels! (Score:2)
"The game had a 1024x1024 matrix of starting and ending positions "
Now TFS makes a bit more sense, and all of the possible positions that vertices can be placed works out to a 1024x1024 grid but those are not pixels in the normal sense of the term. I really wish article writers would be more clear on this to prevent confusion and misinformation.
steam (Score:2)
There's a "hidden" copy of spacewar on steam: steam://install/480/
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Works. Way better than Pong methinks.
Another port of MIT Spacewar (Score:2)
Back in 1976 or 1977 at Lawrence Livermore Lab, an MIT graduate, Mike Maintan(?), ported Spacewar to a Varian 620 in the Conflict Simulation Lab. I no longer recall the graphics unit. He built custom controllers and got everything running.
As I also had access to a PDP-1, I could compare and they looked looked identical in operation though I really could not play on the PDP-1 as I lacked suitable controllers for that machine.
Memories... (Score:2)
I'm too young for the 1960's original, but there was a Scientific American article about how to write a clone of Spacewar back in the late 80's, probably in one of the regular "Computer Recreations" articles. Most of the articles were interesting - this wasn't the only thing I learned from them. It might have been February 1987 [scientificamerican.com], but I'm not sure (the table of contents doesn't go into enough detail, I can't find a good index of the computer recreations articles online, and the printed version of this issue
Huh? (Score:2)
"1024 x 1024 pixel CRT display"
Weren't those displays vector displays, which didn't have any "pixels"?
I don't know if there was any kind of raster mode for the PDP/vector graphics system (the 1024x1024 mentioned here) but Spacewar is/was a vector graphics game.
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its vector but where you could put a point was a 1024x1024 grid
Re: Huh? (Score:2)
Still does not count as "pixels". Vertex placement points yes but not pixels.
I wish the writing quality of TFA was better. :-\
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its the virge, their stupid asses don't know the difference tween zip ties and tweezers
why not just port ur quan masters? (Score:2)
its got excellent ships with solid balance, a viable computer control for versus, and one of the mist epic single-player games ever!
but no,just take the easy way out