NEC’s Tetris Processor | Hacker News Reader

NEC’s Tetris Processor

leadedsolder.com

137 pointszdw9 comments

Man, that title screen. There's a clear beauty in 1-bit displays that's really hard to explain to people who've never seen them in person. I remember the absolute beauty of the black and white Macintoshes, those pixels so immediately next to one another and only maximum contrast manipulated to make beautiful art.

It can't quite be replicated on modern displays. Even screenshots don't do it justice. It's the closest thing to newsprint until the kindle.

I'm surprised by how polished this version of Tetris appears to be, given it's for a word processor with a monitor that doesn't do the art of the game the justice it deserves.

I noticed in some of the screenshots that Tokyo System House (TSH), which produced the game for NEC, sublicensed Tetris from Bullet Proof Software (BPS), which licensed it from Elorg (Электро́норгтехника).

In 1988, BPS produced Tetris for many computer platforms in Japan, including FM-7, MSX2, PC-8800, PC-9800, X1, X68000, and Family Computer (NES). Some of these are NEC products. By 1991, when the word processor version was released, Tetris had been ported to even more machines including TRS-80, Amiga, ZX Spectrum, and Macintosh.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Tetris_variants

So I imagine the high polish of the game is due to existing industry experience and references.

FM-7 had a pair of 6809s, and the MSX2 had a 16-bit extension of the Z-80. TIL.

It seems like an important historical artifact too!

It would be interesting to make it playable through qemu on archive.org

The image transcription in the alt-text is a nice touch.

Really neat bit of history, and the archival process was fun to read. Thanks for sharing!

Seems like TETRIS.COM is the loader, probably reading from disk and executing the game.

Microsoft Flight Simulator for the Tandy 2000 -- as far as I know, the only graphical game ever released for that system -- contained a single file FS.COM, size 60 bytes. Presumably the Flight Simulator program itself and all its data lived outside the file system and FS.COM simply bootstrapped the real program living elsewhere.

There is a byte-for-byte copy of the Flight Simulator for Tandy 1000, 1200HD, and 2000 disk floating around out there and it actually boots -- but says "Disk Error" when you try to actually start the simulator after the initial menu. So I guess someone will need to take a Kryoflux image in order to truly preserve the software... or write a trainer for it.

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