2011/Canada/Winnipeg/Skullspace
The monthly hack-a-thon at Winnipeg Skullspace will recognize Software Freedom Day (Saturday 17th) by incorporating some free and open source software related events into that day.
Spacewar! tournament
Spacewar! was one of the earliest computer action games. Developed by hackers for the PDP-1 initially in 1961 and 1962, and released with freely shared source code; it is the first notable free and open source action game.
As a tribute in this 50th year since development started, Skullspace member Mark Jenkins will host a tournament using a version running on on a PDP-1 emulator written in Java.
( Does anyone want to point out any of the cool things going on in the source? )
Concurrent with the tournament, Adrian will demonstrate what the loading experience was like on the PDP-1 in 1961 with the punched tape reader for his PDP-11 -- with a game with a confusingly similar name, Spacewars.
And Mark will invite folks waiting around to read out chapter 3 on Spacewar! from Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution by Steven Levy.
Tournament Format
- Position in tournament to be determined by tournament administrator
- Number of rounds required to win a match to be determined by tournament administrator in order to target 15:00 finish time
- Left/right position on keyboard determined by tournament administrator