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Hacking a bit with spacewar without EAE, detailed info about AX08 programming wanted.

Everything seems to work, so I've put the SpaceWar version on GitHub.
It is a bit preliminary but it works fine here. I was hoping that some people
can do some tests with it and leave some comments.

This version does not have the bright star in the middle of the screen.
So no gravity behaviour like the other versions. But there is a comment
from the original author that he reserved some space in the code to
add a sun in a later moment. So if anyone likes to add that to the code... ;)

I still have a little dot at the left of the screen. So that is a thing to fix.
Maybe someone can test this version in SIMH as well? I've never used SIMH before...

https://github.com/Roland-Huisman/SpaceWar

Regards, Roland
 
Roland,

Yes, it works fine on my PiDP-8, using the simh version that has the vc8 device added. Now where are my Spacewar controllers... ;)

Kind regards,

Oscar.
 
Oscar said:
Yes, it works fine on my PiDP-8, using the simh version that has the vc8 device added.
Click to expand...

Hi Oscar,

Thanks for testing!

Oscar said:
Now where are my Spacewar controllers... ;)
Click to expand...

Hmm I don't know hot this is done for the other version which uses the EAE option?
Or is this nor implemented yet?

In my version you can use the front panel switches as well as the joysticks.
It depends on the switch register when starting the the program.

It might be interesting to edit this version a bit further so that the switch functions
are equal to the EAE version. (That is not the case at the moment)

Regards, Roland
 
Oscar said:
Roland,

Yes, it works fine on my PiDP-8, using the simh version that has the vc8 device added. Now where are my Spacewar controllers... ;)

Kind regards,

Oscar.
Click to expand...

How does this work with Simh? I never used a VC8 in real life or now. Just curious.
 
Roland Huisman said:
Hmm I don't know hot this is done for the other version which uses the EAE option?
Or is this nor implemented yet?

In my version you can use the front panel switches as well as the joysticks.
Regards, Roland
Click to expand...

Oh, I just soldered wires at the back of the relevant SR switches, and lead them out to a box with 4 push buttons. Very low-tech, but that was how the original controllers were done too!

Kind regards,

Oscar.
 
tradde said:
How does this work with Simh? I never used a VC8 in real life or now. Just curious.
Click to expand...


On the PiDP-8 forum, Ian Schofield and Frederic Rible added VC08 emulation on the Raspberry Pi's HDMI and over HTTP in a browser respectively. It's not in regular simh and probably won't be in the foreseeable future. But this post gives the information: https://groups.google.com/d/msg/pidp-8/rhb_YuwXRgs/gfYpkqDmAAAJ

Just replace the regular pidp8i-sim executable with the version of Frederic in that link.
Or I can send you the binary, it's all you need. It runs the EAE version of spacewar (by Wrede) as well as Minsky's Kaleidoscope. And the newly-written hi-res version of life by Kyle Owen. The latter is a particularly nice demo. 'attach vc8 X11' is all you need to enter in the modified simh, but there are some nice other options.

Kind regards,

Oscar.
 
Oscar said:
Oh, I just soldered wires at the back of the relevant SR switches, and lead them out to a box with 4 push buttons.
Very low-tech, but that was how the original controllers were done too!
Click to expand...

Great! I like low tech solutions because everyone can do that! :)

In the meanwhile I fixed the dot on the left side of the screen
and I've changed all labels and text to capital characters.

I've copied the file into OS/8 and compiled it with the original
PAL8 assembler and that works fine too...

I hope others have have fun too with this SpaceWar version.
https://github.com/Roland-Huisman/SpaceWar

Regards, Roland
 
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