Looking for a Nice Demo Program

[Steven Mason]

Hello all,

I'm looking for a nice demo program to show off my PIDP8i to family while I am learning the PDP8 Basic and delving into ASM (.PA files). Anyone have a nice one in Assembly,  Basic or even a Binary all ready to go?

Thanks,

Steve

[timr...@gmail.com]

Do you know which OS you plan to run?  OS/8? Or something else.  While not being a demo program I have found that the Adventure game flashes the lights quite nicely.  While wating for input

the AC rotatees back and forth a pattern.  And while actually figuring out what you input the lights flash all over the place.  I think it's available under OS/8 but I could be wrong.  I know I ran

it long ago on real hardware and saw those lights.  I even have a short video of it.  I am sure others will have other and maybe better suggestions.  There is always the AC counting small

toggle in program.

[Bobby Ess]

I do the following which results in a nice blinkenlight display:

SSH to Pi host

<enter credentials>

> pidp8i start (if not already started by boot process)

> pidp8i

At the  ‘.’ prompt type

EXEC LIFE

Enter in any pattern of numbers at the question mark prompt

Capital Z - this starts the Life program.

CTRL E to stop the program and back to sim> prompt

sim> set throttle 1/25

sim> cont

The resulting display gives nice blinkenlights.

[Steven Mason]

Running OS/8.

The LIFE.BA does do a nice job.

[Steve Tockey]

Chekmo, the Chess program will either run stand-alone or under OS/8. Its light patterns are pretty interesting. These commands are useful:

PW = "Play White"

PB = "Play Black"

BM = "Blitz Mode", it doesn't think very hard between moves and takes 20-30 seconds

TM = "Thought Mode", it does think harder between moves  and takes 2-3 minutes or so to move

By typing both PW and PB it will play against itself.

Also, for the most part, the MQ lights are blank because most programs don't use them and/or EAE is not installed. Some programs do use MQ and some run with EAE enabled meaning the MQ lights can be interesting.

In addition, at my old high school in 1975/1976 the rite of passage on the 8/e was a one-dimensional Pong on the front panel. Hopefully the attached paper tape image is readable on your PiDP-8/i. it is reasonably well documented in the code as long as you can read it in.

-- steve

[Steve Tockey]

And here's a version of KAB (one dimensional Pong) source code that should be read-able on a Mac or PC.

-- steve