More PDP-8 Software Donated to the RICM

[m. thompson]

The RICM received another donatation of PDP-8 material. In the box were paper tapes that look to be for a PDP-5:

Maindec 811 High Speed Reader
Maindec 817 High Speed Punch

One tape labeled AJAE Focal 69 + init. This should be DEC-08-AJAE-PB Focal 69.

One tape labeled LBAA Binary Loader. This should be DEC-08-LBAA-PM Binary Loader.

There are other tapes labeled Craps Game, Blackjack both with SA=0200. If this is the DECUS Focal Blackjack would it have SA=0200?

And Chess Game Bin with SA=5000. The notes with this one say that it was written by a graduate student at the University of British Columbia.

[dpi]

On Jul 3, 7:04 pm, "m. thompson" <michael.99.thomp...@gmail.com>
wrote:

> There are other tapes labeled Craps Game, Blackjack both with SA=0200. If this is the DECUS Focal Blackjack would it have SA=0200?

By convention programs start at 0200. This was because 0200 is the
lowest address not on page 0. Since page zero can be referenced from
anywhere in that field of memory that makes it especially useful for
storing variables and frequently used constants. When they don't
start at 200 the reason is often that the space for the initialization
code gets reused for something else.

> And Chess Game Bin with SA=5000. The notes with this one say that it was written by a graduate student at the University of British Columbia.

I played one version of chess on the 8 and it was dismally bad. I
don't know if it was this one. About the only thing good you could
say about it was it played <grin>.

--
Doug Ingraham
Rapid City, SD

[Klemens Krause]

m. thompson wrote:
...

>
> One tape labeled AJAE Focal 69 + init. This should be DEC-08-AJAE-PB Focal 69.
>

...

>
> There are other tapes labeled Craps Game, Blackjack both with SA=0200. If this
> is the DECUS Focal Blackjack would it have SA=0200?

Probably not. FOCAL itself starts on address 0200. So if this should really be the
FOCAL-Blackjack or FOCAL-Craps then the taped must be longer than the pure FOCAL-
interpreter. Normally a working FOCAL-program is punched on the teletype by giving:
WRITE ALL
Since a FOCAL-programm can only contain aprox 700 tokens on a 4K PDP8, typing out
the FOCAL-program is mutch more efficient, than to dump out the FOCAL-interpreter
with the tokenized user-program.
The catalog contains 3 Blackjack-games FOCAL8-75, FOCAL8-156 and FOCAL8-267.
According to my DECUS-catalog there was a Craps (BASIC8-55.33) written by David
Ahl, a revised version vor RStS-11 running now under OS/8-BASIC. BASIC8-55 contained
more than on game.
All these four games are distributed as G5. "G" means ASCII-papertape and 5 means
10 "Deutsche Mark". Divide this by 3 to get the $-price.

>
> And Chess Game Bin with SA=5000. The notes with this one say that it was written
> by a graduate student at the University of British Columbia.

Interesting. The "classic" chess-game for the PDP8 is CHEKMO II, written by
John E. Comeau. It starts at address 0200. I'm not a chess player, I just know
how the figures on the board move. But some people say that CHEKMO is not a bad
player. What about a fight your-chess-player versus CHEKMO II?

Klemens

[m. thompson]

We loaded Blackjack, Craps, and Chess with the BIN loader on the 8/S yesterday. They all ran OK. Pictures of the Blackjack and Craps games are at the bottom of the page: https://sites.google.com/site/ricmwarehouse/Home/equipment/pdp-8s/pdp-8s_blog

Are these the DECUS games?