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Old 09-05-2014, 02:47 PM
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mpatoray mpatoray is offline
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Join Date: Apr 2010
Location: Near Youngstown Ohio
Posts: 258
Playing Space Invaders on a PDP-11

A few weeks agao we had a Hack session down at my buddy's place in PA. We accomplished many things but the BIG thing was getting his DEC PDP-11/70 up and running, running on a DEC VT-320 terminal.

After we celebrated, by dreaming up even bigger things to do with it(install an Ethernet interface and get it on the net!). wE THEN DECIDED TO USE THE SMALLER pdp-11/23 setup to see if we could archive a set of 8" DEC floppy discs (the 11/70's floppy drive broke a belt). We where able to read all 10 floppy discs and get off all of the data.

One of the programs was called SPACE.SAV which in DEC parlance is an executable file. Typed in run and up on the terminal came Space Invaders!

The implementation is quite good, since it is a terminal graphics are rendered using ANSI characters, there is even animation of those chars, all pretty good for a data rate 0f 9,600 Baud.

There is also a bit of humor built into the game, if you just sit there and do nothing, get bombed and have a very low score, instead of saying 'High Score" at the top of the screen it says 'What utter crap"
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