Re: This is pretty cool...

On Mon, 13 Apr 1998 17:27:47 -0700 (PDT), aek@spies.com (Al Kossow) wrote:

>
>""And for the "emulator inclined" the PDP1 instructions set can be found =
>out:
>
> http://www.dbit.com/~greeng3/pdp1/index.html"
>
>..actually, there is a PDP-1 simuator as part of
>the DEC simulator collection
>(doesn't simulate the x/y scope though)
>
>wasn't the PDP-1 display point-plot, BTW?

From what I can tell by reading the above link to the "Handbook", the only
instruction available was "Plot a single point".

There is no "turn point on / turn point off" just plot.

So I assume either the point remains until you "plot another point" or more
likely the point is "strobed" and if you want the point to remain then you must
constantly rewrite the point. The phosphor was very slow and the handbook
claims 20,000 points per second may be plotted. Does this mean the strobe
length was 1/20000 of a second?

It looks like a DVG where the PDP-1 had to plot each point! At a 5us
instruction clock, with 10us average instruction times the Frame Per Second
couldn't be that fast!

It would be neat to see a realtime emulation of the game (using the proper
instruction times to recreate the actual game speed). It wouldn't play as nice
as the Cinematronics version, but hey, you could release the "roms" with the
code with nothing more than a (well deserved) acknowledgement to the authors!

-Zonn

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Received on Mon Apr 13 18:17:53 1998