

Show HN: Spacewar! featuring the original "Minskytron Hyperspace" - masswerk
http://www.masswerk.at/spacewar/?version=spacewar2x

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masswerk
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!

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

[http://www.wheels.org/spacewar/creative/SpacewarOrigin.html](http://www.wheels.org/spacewar/creative/SpacewarOrigin.html)

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masswerk
See also
[http://www.masswerk.at/spacewar/SpacewarOrigin.html](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/](http://www.masswerk.at/spacewar/inside/)

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alewix
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/](http://orbital.lewix.eu/)

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masswerk
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).

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abengoam
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).

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robin_reala
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”.

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

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robin_reala
Working, thanks :)

