This was one of the links in the text you see if you scroll down the page instead of starting the game. Lots of other interesting information there too.
I've never played the original game on the PDP-1, but in the late 1970s I played a clone of it that ran on an 8080 system[1] hooked up to a Tektronix 4010[2] storage-tube terminal.
When I was a young child my father took me to work (Kodak research labs, where he devised the Bayer filter for digital cameras) one evening in the 1960's for a family night. I played Spacewar! on the original hardware.
They ran Spacewar on a real DEC PDP-1 in Computer History Museum in Mountain View, CA 3-4 years ago, and let us play it ourselves. The presenter was one of the developers worked on it IIRC.
Yep. A friend of mine and myself got do this as well; CHM was running this pretty much every weekend as I recall. An incredible experience considering we went to the museum that day on a whim with no specific plan.
Stephen Russell was talking to the participants and Peter Samson was actually operating the PDP-1... my guess is this was a regular thing for them.
An interesting note... not only was Stephen Russell a creator of effectively the first computer video game... he wrote the first Lisp interpreter based on John McCarthy's paper.
> Steve Russell said, look, why don't I program this eval ..., and I said to him, ho, ho, you're confusing theory with practice, this eval is intended for reading, not for computing. But he went ahead and did it. That is, he compiled the eval in my paper into [IBM] 704 machine code, fixing bugs, and then advertised this as a Lisp interpreter, which it certainly was. So at that point Lisp had essentially the form that it has today....
John McCarthy, in an interview quoted in http://www.paulgraham.com/icad.html . Anyone lucky enough to meet Russell at CHM should ask politely for a photograph with him.
Well, while I didn't get the photo and I only spoke to him about "Spacewar!" and later reimplimentations (I didn't know about his link to Lisp at the time)... I nonetheless had him autograph a "Spacewar!" t-shirt for me.
Brings back great memories. Based on the article in Byte Magazine 1977 (1) I got Spacewar running (in assembly language) on my kit-built Processor Technolory Sol 8088 microcomputer. Also built the 8 bit DAC and two hand controllers. The display was my kit-built Heathkit oscilloscope. It was magical to see those satellites orbiting for the first time!
Author of that page here: I'm looking for a free and viable service for switching (TURN) and brokering a WebRTC-based remote version. (The emulation is prepared for assync operations since a few years already.) Any recommendations?
First of all, thank you for a very special site. Second, I am not clear on the technology but if it’s just JavaScript couldn’t any free hosting like GitHub or Netlify or free tier Cloudflare do the trick?
Finally, of course I’d be happy to pay for a DigitalOcean or Hetzner shared host (contact info in profile).
Longer exposure, but the lights in the room were dimmed as well to allow it to show up. The brightness was pretty limited. No filter used other than the iPhone native camera in low light conditions.
That page (BA.net) is just a pirated version of the original with advertising added. (Not really amused.)
The original version works with touch, as well. (The same controls are used by the printed version, including the visual assets.) If you don't get the touch controllers automatically, have a look at the option menu (the stylized gear icon at the top of the screen).
Moreover, any game controllers should be supported (matching the usage scheme from the 1981 anniversary reunion at the Boston Computer Museum using Atari joysticks.)
https://www.masswerk.at/spacewar/inside
This was one of the links in the text you see if you scroll down the page instead of starting the game. Lots of other interesting information there too.
I've never played the original game on the PDP-1, but in the late 1970s I played a clone of it that ran on an 8080 system[1] hooked up to a Tektronix 4010[2] storage-tube terminal.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IMSAI_8080
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tektronix_4010