Space War Classic
01/12/1999 . Source: Stephen Hunt 

One of my defining experiences as a young pup was attending a World SF con at Brighton when I was a kid in the 70s.

One of my defining experiences as a young pup was attending a World SF con at Brighton when I was a kid in the 70s.

I must have been about 12, and I was certainly their youngest paid-up delegate.

As well as getting picked up by one of George Lucas's SFX crew and stuck in a pre-Empire Strikes Back Snow Speeder for a photo opportunity, the Con was the first time I had seen an Arcade computer game (they didn't have them in the UK yet - this was pre-Space Invaders and PacMan even).

It was called Space War, and consisted of two little space ships that could be played 2-user and set against each other around a black-hole.

I thought this was marvellous. A real miracle, and played it for most of the Con. So imagine my delight when I discovered this site ... a Java SpaceWar! game.

Spacewar! was first conceived in 1961 by Martin Graetz, Stephen Russell, and Wayne Wiitanen.

The site is the original version. Martin Graetz provided these lads with a printed version of the source. For the technical heads among you, they typed the code in again. It was about 40 pages long - then re-assembled it with a PDP-1 assembler written in PERL. The resulting binary runs on a PDP-1 emulator written as a Java applet.

Their code looks like it's extremely faithful to the original. There are only two changes.

1) The spaceships have been made bigger and 2) The overall timing has been special cased to deal with varying machine speeds.

The "a", "s", "d", "f" keys control one of the spaceships. The "k", "l", ";", "'" keys control the other. The controls are spin one way, spin the other, thrust, and fire.

Play on here ... but send your ten cent (or pence, or francs, or yen) pieces care of the Nest, please.