

Real-life Tron on an Apple II GS - pelf
http://blog.danielwellman.com/2008/10/real-life-tron-on-an-apple-iigs.html

======
nitrogen
This has been posted before[0], two[1] and four[2] years ago, and is a
delightful and fascinating read every time. It's fun to anthropomorphize the
AI running amok in the system's memory, and wonder if we'll ever see something
analogous happen with more sophisticated AIs in the future.

[0] [http://blog.danielwellman.com/2008/10/real-life-tron-on-
an-a...](http://blog.danielwellman.com/2008/10/real-life-tron-on-an-apple-
iigs.html)

[1]
[http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2087367](http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2087367)

[2]
[http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=326356](http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=326356)

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ChuckMcM
My first thought was "OMG he has a working Apple II GS?" and then I realized
it was already 4 years old when it was written, and the author was recounting
a tale from his childhood.

Lots of Amiga stories from the late 80's early 90's dealing with the fact that
the Amiga was a multi-tasking system with an unprotected address space. Great
when all the tasks are written by the same group, not so great when they
aren't :-)

Of course the notion of anyone being able to write anywhere was the basis for
ITS (the Incompatible Timesharing Service) at MIT which was a great
counterpoint to Tenex (DEC 10 Executive) which was locked down pretty hard. It
changes the way you think when you realize you can tell the computer to do
anything you want and it will try to do it, up to and including killing
itself.

~~~
justanother
Daily Apple IIGS user here, with one 65816 project on github. :) There are
still a few of us. For what it's worth, mine is stable at 12MHz (hot-rodded
Transwarp GS), and is completely solid-state: CompactFlash and LCD only, no
floppies or CRT monitors. I may not have used it to write this post, but I'm
still busy trying to beat all the games.

~~~
ckeck
Just recently snagged a mint Apple IIGS "Woz Edition" and can't wait to get it
set up. Need to figure out how to do this solid-state conversion though, that
would be really helpful. Any guides you can point to?

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salgernon
This made me think of CoreWars:

[http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2008/04/core-war-two-
progra...](http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2008/04/core-war-two-programs-
enter-one-program-leaves.html)

First read about it a few years after Tron came out.

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jevinskie
It is really fascinating how humans immediately crash when they break out of
the screen while the AI can follow the 0's in system memory fast enough to
stand a chance.

~~~
tekromancr
That I think, is the most thrilling part of the story. Imagine how much longer
it could go if it didn't leave a bit trail. I bet if you ran this in an
emulator, you could arrange the memory array to resemble the screen, and watch
it drive around.

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dnautics
I don't know if there are any hackers here who used to go to a high school
called "H-B Woodlawn" where they had made a way, way, way more exciting
version of tron called "trench".

Anyways, it would be neat to bring that back.

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BHSPitMonkey
Uh oh... The AI just fired its second missile at my unsaved thesis edits.

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mwcampbell
What's sad is that huge amounts of software are still not provably memory-
safe, and this sometimes has disastrous consequences, particularly for
security. I hope that Mozilla's work on Rust will significantly contribute to
solving that problem.

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tekromancr
Delightful. I love this sort of thing. My jaw almost hit the floor when I
realized what was happening when the cycle drove off screen. Does anyone know
where I can find more stories like this?

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kayoone
reading this while accidentally listening to the awesome TRON Legacy
Soundtrack by Daft Punk :)

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moneyrich2
omg we must go rescue him

