Galaxy Game – INTERIM COMPUTER MUSEUM

Galaxy Game: Restoring the First Coin-Op Video Game

To support the preservation of Galaxy Game, please consider a donation today.

Galaxy Game in motion (MAME) and as it’s at present displayed

Spacewar! was written on the PDP-1 at MIT in 1962 and unfold wherever there was a show to run it, together with the PDP-6 and later PDP-10 on the Stanford AI Lab, the place Bill Pitts spent his nights enjoying it. It even made the soar to smaller machines just like the Imlac PDS-1. In 1971 two groups got down to put it in entrance of the paying public. Nolan Bushnell and Ted Dabney checked out a Data General Nova, discovered it wasn’t as much as the job, and constructed Computer Space for Nutting Associates as an alternative: devoted TTL logic and a closeout mid-Nineteen Sixties GE tv with the video hacked into the IF, a cupboard constructed to eat dimes and quarters. It went into manufacturing and received the market. Pitts and Hugh Tuck went the opposite manner.

Galaxy Game, put in at Stanford’s Tresidder Union in September 1971, was the Cadillac of Spacewars. It ran on an actual PDP-11/20 with 8K bytes of core, a point-plotting show interface designed by Ted Panofsky, and an HP 1300A electrostatic X-Y show, with a trustworthy PDP-11 re-implementation of SAIL’s PDP-10 Spacewar. No quantity of dimes and quarters was ever going to pay for that {hardware}, nevertheless lengthy the strains obtained, they usually obtained as much as an hour lengthy. Pitts didn’t care: he needed an genuine expertise within the direct line of the PDP-1, PDP-6 and PDP-10 recreation. A 1972 revision let one PDP-11 drive a number of consoles, and it ran till 1979 when the show processor lastly gave out. Pitts and Panofsky revived it in 1997.

Galaxy Game cupboards staged for Labor Day Weekend 2026

Galaxy Game has now come to ICM for one more restoration, instigated by Bill Pitts, Josh Dersch and Robert Schmuck. The PDP-11’s energy provide has been rebuilt and the machine is working. The HP 1300A shows are subsequent, they usually want a full refurbishment: these are 20 kV electrostatic-deflection tubes with a diode-ladder excessive voltage provide, and after fifty years they’re dim and out of focus. That means working by way of the deflection amplifiers, the HV multiplier and the main target circuitry to get again the sharp, vivid vectors gamers lined up for in 1971.

You can come see Galaxy Game on show at ICM now, and you’ll play it at this time underneath MAME. If you’d like to help bring the real thing back to life, please consider supporting this restoration.