Show HN: Spacewar! featuring the original "Minskytron Hyperspace"

http://www.masswerk.at/spacewar/?version=spacewar2x

by masswerk • 12 years ago

16 9 12 years ago

masswerk4• 12 years ago

I finally managed to identify Martin Graetz's original hyperspace routine, featuring the "hyperspace Minskytron signature" (as described and depicted in "Origin of Spacewar"). This was actually a patch (hyperspace85.bin) to "Spacewar! 2B".

This was actually the first hyperspace in history (in the very first digital video game) – and what a nice one!

fjarlq• 12 years ago

The Origin of Spacewar, by J. M. Graetz:

http://www.wheels.org/spacewar/creative/SpacewarOrigin.html

masswerk4• 12 years ago

See also http://www.masswerk.at/spacewar/SpacewarOrigin.html (corrected and annotated version, including additional interviews and images).

Some of my own analysis: http://www.masswerk.at/spacewar/inside/

alewix• 12 years ago

I hope it's ok if I plug my own little "Spacewar!" hobby project. It's not as true to the original, but it automatically matches people connecting to the game to have them play against each other:

http://orbital.lewix.eu/

masswerk4• 12 years ago

Totally ok :-) I was always thinking of doing this with the original game via WebRTC DataChannels (that's also a reason for the emulation running the display asynchronously, so one could be driving the other).

BTW: By this Spacewar! would then become Orbitwar (Silas Warner, 1974 / PATO network).

robin_reala2• 12 years ago

Is it meant to work in Firefox? I’m getting the classic JS error “SyntaxError: numbers starting with 0 followed by a digit are octals and can't contain 9”.

masswerk4• 12 years ago

Just tested with FF 29.0.1 -- Please reload and try again ...

robin_reala2• 12 years ago

Working, thanks :)

abengoam• 12 years ago

Nice! Playing spacewar on the real hardware was one of the big highlights of my last visit to the Mountain View Computer History Museum (the other one being seeing the recreation of the Difference Engine actually working).

Show HN: Spacewar! featuring the original "Minskytron Hyperspace"

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