Most of our effort went into a solitaire version of pong, where you used arrow keys to move the "bat" along the bottom of the screen, and the "ball" ricocheted symmetrically off the top. If I recall correctly, the ball sped up over time, and we introduced some randomness in ricochet to make it a challenge you'd eventually lose. But honestly, it was a long time ago, so how much of what I remember actually worked well, I wouldn't bet.
It did teach me 8008 assembler though. Used that later build a primitive RT OS with multi-level interrupts that operated a cross-bar switch for connecting KSR 33 teletypes to different computers in the lab. That was fun. We wrote the OS in concurrent pascal pseudo-code, then hand compiled into assembler.
Comments
Most of our effort went into a solitaire version of pong, where you used arrow keys to move the "bat" along the bottom of the screen, and the "ball" ricocheted symmetrically off the top. If I recall correctly, the ball sped up over time, and we introduced some randomness in ricochet to make it a challenge you'd eventually lose. But honestly, it was a long time ago, so how much of what I remember actually worked well, I wouldn't bet.
It did teach me 8008 assembler though. Used that later build a primitive RT OS with multi-level interrupts that operated a cross-bar switch for connecting KSR 33 teletypes to different computers in the lab. That was fun. We wrote the OS in concurrent pascal pseudo-code, then hand compiled into assembler.
Very fun story, thanks.
I love low level programming, but I never considered that technique back in the day. Kind of brilliant.