I recently stumbled across this page, which describes a very early computer game (in fact, a heavily-qualified “first”). The page included a link to scans of the original machine code. The page also included this portentous sentence:

It has been suggested that the intact program in the manuscript be replicated and made into an emulation of the game to run on modern hardware.

So, being highly suggestible, and apparently having no other demands on my time, that’s exactly what I did. (To be fair, I was also sort of curious about just how fast modern computers and JS engines had gotten. Was it feasible to do instruction-level emulation of early hardware in a browser? Yes. Yes, it was.)

I hope you enjoy the game. Thanks to Richard Adams for answering some of my questions, and to Scott Adams for writing the game and (hopefully) not suing me. Since this sucked up a disproportionate amount of my time, you can expect some followup posts milking this little exercise for all it’s worth.