Hah, I heard about this at VCF East this year, but didn't get to check out the exhibit. There was another MC server demo running on old Macs IIRC. Shame the event was cut short due to a bomb threat.
Yeah, I was there on Saturday and could not imagine how it would end the next day. Got to see the Univac powered up but not spitting out those awesome outputs at the time.
What a great write up, and a video too! Even though Minecraft stuff ofc was a bit of a bait, it would be interesting see the answer to "Can it run Doom?".
Feels kind of like when Usagi Eletric got "Doom" running on a vacuum tube computer with a teletype interface without support for even ASCII, but it was just an imitation of the background music.
Also it's a 250khz CPU. Not megahertz. Kilohertz. It's slower than the 1MHZ 8-bit home computers like the Apple ][ or c64.
"Running" Doom might be possible with some insane hack that offloads storage and/or processing to more modern hardware crammed into the UNIVAC case but given that this is one of two UNIVACs in the entire world, and the only one that actually runs, I don't think the museum is gonna let anyone cram a Raspberry Pi up in there.
Now, if the game was libre software it could be improved and ported to Puny Inform (a 'lite' version of Inform6 tuned for smaller machines) creating a really small Z3 file being able to play it from the PDP10 and 8 bit microcomputers to anything from today. From smartphones to PDA's to GNU/Linux with Frotz to Winfrotz and Lectrote and Fabularium for Android/Mac and iOS.
So, 'does it run Doom'? Man, you can play Zork in a pen with writting detection. How cool is that?
Favourite article I've read in a while, what a delight. I wonder what kind of performance you could get if someone hand wrote a dedicated, modern C compiler for it.
I watched the video when it came out, I've been a fan of his stuff for a while. It'd been a while since he uploaded and I was rewatching some of his videos the night before this was uploaded!
Stupid question, would a quick&dirty LLVM backend for univac be possible to write, or are there inherent incompatibilities due to its weird architecture?
WOW! I started off thinking "this could be a boring meandering through registers and op codes" but by the time I got half way through your write-up, I was bouncing off the walls excited. Thanks for sharing your awesome write-up and glad you had such a cool project!
Research UNIX was ported to the UNIVAC, which (I believe) was the first SMP kernel implementation. It ran on top of the native kernel, known as EXEC-8. A later port to IBM hardware did the same.
"The UNIX system for the UNIVAC 1100 series was built as an integrated development environment for transactions that run directly on EXEC. Unlike most other implementations, therefore, it runs not directly on the hardware but as a collection of user-level activities under control of EXEC. These obtain services that would normally be provided by device drivers, and some process creation and management services from EXEC. Any configuration supplied by Sperry, including multiprocessor ones, can run the UNIX system."
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[ 4.5 ms ] story [ 45.0 ms ] threadAnything for the thumbnail.
Only 40,960 words of memory. That’s only 90kb total memory to split between our code and the memory it needs at runtime.
Looking at a copy of Doom on the Internet Archive (https://ia800404.us.archive.org/view_archive.php?archive=/15...), DOOM.EXE is about 709k, and DOOM.WAD is about 11159k.
I think that's a pretty solid no.
Also it's a 250khz CPU. Not megahertz. Kilohertz. It's slower than the 1MHZ 8-bit home computers like the Apple ][ or c64.
"Running" Doom might be possible with some insane hack that offloads storage and/or processing to more modern hardware crammed into the UNIVAC case but given that this is one of two UNIVACs in the entire world, and the only one that actually runs, I don't think the museum is gonna let anyone cram a Raspberry Pi up in there.
- Zork I-III
- Calypso
- Tristam Island
- All the Z3 machine games at IF archive
- The rest of Infocom propietary games
https://www.ifwiki.org/List_of_Z-machine_interpreters
Also: https://ifdb.org/viewgame?id=lkr2jf03np19ieix
Now, if the game was libre software it could be improved and ported to Puny Inform (a 'lite' version of Inform6 tuned for smaller machines) creating a really small Z3 file being able to play it from the PDP10 and 8 bit microcomputers to anything from today. From smartphones to PDA's to GNU/Linux with Frotz to Winfrotz and Lectrote and Fabularium for Android/Mac and iOS.
So, 'does it run Doom'? Man, you can play Zork in a pen with writting detection. How cool is that?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rEQlOrPs6fw
"The UNIX system for the UNIVAC 1100 series was built as an integrated development environment for transactions that run directly on EXEC. Unlike most other implementations, therefore, it runs not directly on the hardware but as a collection of user-level activities under control of EXEC. These obtain services that would normally be provided by device drivers, and some process creation and management services from EXEC. Any configuration supplied by Sperry, including multiprocessor ones, can run the UNIX system."
https://www.nokia.com/bell-labs/about/dennis-m-ritchie/other...
https://codeberg.org/luxferre/scoundrel-ports
Rules:
gopher://hoi.st/0/posts/2026-01-05-discovered-new-game.txt
https://msyksphinz-self.github.io/riscv-isadoc/html/rvi.html...