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Minimum requirements for original tetris?

alexkerhead

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Joined
Mar 13, 2006
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Montgomery, AL USA
I loaded the original tetris on my compaq portable plus, with an 8088 and 256KB RAM, and the original tetris runs great.
Does anyone know what the minimum reqs for the original tetris are?
I always assumed 80186 with 640KB RAM.

Here is an image of it running the original tetris.
Pic running tetris
 
I've played the original Tetris on the Wang PC compatible, in IBM PC emulation.

When it comes to clones, I've seen a B/W one on unexpanded ZX-81 (less than 1K RAM program), and made my own on the VIC-20 etc. Around 1K RAM should be enough for most Tetris implementations. There was one for the PC which is made in 256 bytes, I think.
 
Tetris or Tetris clones can be found on everything from the Atari 2600 to LCD watches. The original version of Tetris programmed didn't even use graphics. So I certainly agree that a Tetris game can and has been made to run on anything capable of simulating animation, which certainly includes any computer I can think of with a decent screen size (I'm thinking it might not be as much fun on a Tandy Pocket Computer or an Epson HX-20, for instance).
 
The one that runs on my Amstrad NC100 (8 lines x 80 columns screen, 64K RAM, 2.5MHz Z80, under a CP/M clone) runs sideways. Works out pretty well, you just hold the computer the wrong way. Haven't seen the one for the HX-20, but I do have some other graphical games for it (Bomber, Artillery, etc), written in BASIC.

--T
 
alexkerhead wrote:

> I loaded the original tetris on my compaq portable
> plus, with an 8088 and 256KB RAM, and the original
> tetris runs great.

> Does anyone know what the minimum reqs for the
> original tetris are? I always assumed 80186 with
> 640KB RAM.

Funny, I always thought the original Tetris came out in 1987,
released though a software company called Mirrorsoft. This ran
on my ol' Z80 Amstrad CPC with 64k of memory! Considerning it
ran in 64k & was very colourful graphics, an 8088 with 256kb
should be whipping it 4 times over! ;-)

Yeah okay, the original IBM Tetris, not sure, but considerning
this game has been going since '87 you'd think 256k on an 8088
around '88/9 would be exceptable.

Why, what's it saying you need a 80186 with 640k! Rubbish.
There'd be plenty of other versions which'll work in 256k of
memory - the chances of the original being quite old might
mean it was written in Assembly too & if any programming
language is mean't to be compact - it's Assembly (and quick
too!).
 
Oh yes, the 256 byte version I referred to may need a 486 to operate, due to use of instructions or addressing modes not previously available.
 
original tetris was made on an Electronika 60 computer which had 8kb of ram and a M2 cpu copied from the PDP-11s cpu. I guess these could be the minimum requirements?
 
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