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

masswerk.at

16 points·masswerk··9 comments

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!

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

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

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/

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/

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).

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).

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”.

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

Working, thanks :)

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