DEC GT40 original list price?

From: Eric Smith <eric_at_brouhaha.com>
Date: Mon Oct 4 03:43:29 1999

Megan wrote about GT40 Moonlander:
> The version I have is the one I obtained back in 1975 or so... one
> that Jack and I worked on when I was a student at WPI and he was
> visiting the college for some reason... The ME department had a
> GT44 (11/40 based system with a VT11 and VR14) and we did some work
> on it to fix some intensity problems with the thrust and directional
> control bars as well as getting it to work with a programmable clock.

Is it intentional that the minimum thrust setting is 10%?

After the game ran correctly for about six hours, it lost the thrust
indicator (the little horizontal line with a two-digit percentage right
next to the thrust control bar). It was still possible to control the
thrust. After another half hour, the display stopped working entirely,
although from the keyboard beeping on crashes, it was obvious that the
game was still running. I surmise that the display list was getting
corrupted.

Since my GT40 does not have the standard GT40 boot ROMs, it takes me a
long time to toggle in a reassembled version of the standard ROMs,
reorigined to run at 037000, and then load the program. I was annoyed
to find that Moonlander overwrites the memory from 037000 to 037777, so
I guess that wasn't the best choice on my part.

If I'd had time to do it, it would have made sense to ask someone for a
copy of the RIM loader and a description of RIM format, and use that
instead, since it would require much less time to toggle in, and be less
error prone.

I suppose that I should mention that Mike Cheponis and I won the VCF
First Place award in the Minicomputer category for our GT40 exhibit. It
was rumored that Jack Burness might attend the VCF, but AFAIK he didn't.

Cheers,
Eric
Received on Mon Oct 04 1999 - 03:43:29 BST