Kill The Bit - Orton 3C

[Spencer Owen]

In a couple of week I will have a stall at Retro Computer Festival in
Cambridge.  This year the theme is "gaming".

Avoiding text adventures, most of my RC2014 kits will happily run Snake,
Catchum or Ladders. With the addition of a TMSEMU card, games like
TMSnake, Tut-Tut and Mazogs should keep people entertained that want
some graphics.

However, as the Orton 3C is my latest kit, I will need to show that off
too.  Kill The Bit seems like the obvious (and only?) game to play on a
machine like that.  Does anybody know if there is already a port of that
which uses the I/O on Port 0 rather than the address lines like the
Altair did?  I'd rather not reinvent the wheel if there's something
already out there.

Or are there other games that can be played just via a front panel?

Spencer

[Alan Cox]

Mastermind is possible on a front panel guessing with switches and with the display telling you which columns are correct.

 

[Martin Giese]

I made a Lunar Lander for a TI-57 calculator back in the day. I remember that I entered the code and played it multiple times so it must have been kinda fun in a way. It had a loop displaying the height and speed, then pausing for a second or so.  You could halt the program during the pause, enter a new thrust value, and continue. For some reason none of the other kids wanted to play. Doing the same in 8 bit binary display will be good for practicing your grasp of binary numbers :-D

Another idea would be "guess a number between 0 and 255," which you could do both ways, i.e. user needs to guess the number the computer is thinking of, or the computer guesses the user’s number.

One can have a lot of fun with the computer doing something random and the users’ imagination does the rest. E.g. a minimal horse race game where the top and bottom nibbles say how far your two horses have run. They advance randomly. You get to give them cute names, cheer them on and place bets. It’s all up to the crowd.

Or the bits all briefly flash in some random way for a minute or so, and the spectators have to guess which one flashed most often.  Flip a switch and the computer will tell you.

Maybe a puzzle game where each switch toggles some of the 8 bits.  In other words each LED/bit is light based on the XOR of a subset of the switches.  The user tries to find the switch setting that lights up all LEDs.

Martin

[Peter Onion]

You'll really want to put any code for this into the ROM ;-)

PeterO

[Mark T]

How about a game where you have to enter z80 machine code using toggle switches and see if the program will run?

[Martin Giese]

On Wednesday, October 29, 2025 at 2:43:25 PM UTC+1 Mark T wrote:

How about a game where you have to enter z80 machine code using toggle switches and see if the program will run?

Brilliant!  Compared to the other suggestions, it has the advantage that Spencer won’t need to spend hours at the fair entering z80 machine code using toggle switches to get this game up and running 👍 

Martin