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Graphics on the PDP 11

silcreval

silcreval

Experienced Member
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Mar 15, 2009
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UK
Strange question I know - but I imagine there were some solutions. I've started thinking about porting the Relic VM - a long term project to the PDP 11, and although it can work headless - ie just with a terminal output - it would be nice to add some graphics, Relic is a game engine after all.

Now a lot of games can get by with just simple vector graphics, and relic has a few examples of this - e.g. maze runner, asteroids, etc. These might be doable with something like the Kitty terminal (which supports graphics). Maze runner doesnt actually animiate its more of a move and redraw type engine - so the graphic requirements are low.

I'm just wondering what other options are available?

Incidently the VM is tiny so very doable on a PDP 11.
 
That brings up memories, we had VT30H on our SCADA systems to present that status of the installations. And of course we could not refrain ourself to port some of the then famous games to the PDP-11 using VT30H and the large Barco Monitors we had attached to them. We had Snake, Seawulf, Space Invadors. It was only block graphics but still a lot of fun. To enhance the gaming experience we installed small partitions in RSX-11M that covered the registers in the IO page and thus could use normal programs to directly manipulate the device registers without the need of a privileged task.
 
We operated and monitored most of the coal-fired power stations in the UK with PDP-11 computers with Dowty SBD graphics cards.

Our own software languages and operating system could drive multiple vendor's plant I/O equipment and various graphics cards.

Dave
 
You could output graphics using Sixel and use any terminal/terminal emulation that supports it? Probably not ideal for games that needs rapid visual updates, though.
 
I'd pick a target that easy to develop for in an emulator.

So, either a terminal (Kitty, or DEC VT240 and up) attached to a simulated PDP, or a DEC Pro (has built-in graphics) in XHomer.

For vector graphics (VT11 etc.) you can use SIMH.

Terak had raster graphics, but emulating it is tricky at the moment.
 
As far as I understand the VSV11 (and perhaps VSV21) is very similar to the VT11 in terms of instruction set. I wonder if lunarlander would run on a VSV11?
 
There was also the Peritek dual height Qbus 512 x 512 graphics cards in a few variants.
The VCQ-Q was graphics only whilst the VRG-Q was graphics and alphanumeric, having a character eprom on board.
I recently snagged three of the VCQ-Q boards relatively cheaply as a lot off US eBay as they had been mislabelled as memory boards. Also they had been robbed of their 6845 video controller ICs and all the 4164 RAMs, which I easily obtained separately.

There is a scanned manual for the VRG-Q available which matches most of the VCQ-Q but to my knowledge no software or drivers are extant for these cards, maybe one day this might appear so until then they can just accumulate dust.
EDIT just saw the previous post, I suppose software does exist for them!
 
The VRG software used in the display was part of a demo for RT11. See attached. I think they are logical (not sector) RX01 images. There are only test or sample materials examples included. You need to initialize the controller before writing to it. There are .SAV and .MAC programs for this included.

Alan B. has a few graphics cards at SHOP-PDP.NET Ask him nicely if you have an interest in one. Other goodies, including a TCP-IP stack for RT11/TSX+ are on the site.
 

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