I got it to work on the PDP-10. But this is the one I really wanted to see. The original 1962 video game on the PDP-1 at MIT. The PDP-10 version is cool but not the original, with “the needle” and “the wedge”. It certainly was one of the first video games. It was out 10 years before Pong in 1972, an the Magnavox Odyssey the first consumer video game. I had one, only because I had wonderful parents… not the very first model, but not long after.
I tried to get spacewar to run under an emulated PDP-1 in simh… and I did. But it was so slow that it was unplayable. You basically boot from paper tape, which is a spacewar.rim file. I think I got it here.
I also tried and failed, to get it to run under mame. It took some trial an error to figure out how it expected the directory to be, but I finally came to the conclusion that I needed to put a zip file… containing spacewar.zip (containing spacewar.rim) into /usr/share/games/mame/roms/pdp1_ptp/. Because when I did that it complained about the length of spacewar.rim, so I knew it found it. Where previously before I created the pdp1_ptp subdirectory (I got this info from /usr/share/games/mame/hash/pdp1_ptp.xml) and put the zip file into it, it just said it couldn’t find it.
Actually the only one that would work flawlessly was the javascript one that ran in a browser., that I talk about here.
It seems odd that the best PDP-1 version is a javascript one.