[TUHS] Unix v6 chess source code?

Mattis Lind mattislind at gmail.com
Tue Jan 31 17:11:29 AEST 2023


Hello!

I saw someone playing chess on their pdp-11 and thought it could be an
interesting project to run on my pdp-11. At this point the RK05s are not
yet running so booting unix v6 is not possible.

I then thought that if the source code could be found it might be possible
to get it to run standalone with some modifications.

After some googling I found the archive
https://www.tuhs.org/Archive/Distributions/UNSW/7/record0.tar.gz

which contained a chess.lib file. It appeared that this archive contained
source code for some kind of chess program. I have been told that it isn't
the chess written by Ken Thompson so the question is who wrote it? There
are not many comments in the code. Could be interesting to know more about
this chess implementation.

Just looking through the source files and the mk file show that it is
missing a set of files. The mk file references a set of "b"-prefixed
assembly files, bgen.s, bmove.s, bheur.s and bplay.s which are present in
the archive. But it also references a set of files with "w"-prefix, wgen.s,
wmove.s, wheur.s and wplay.s which are missing.

I also recognise that there is an include file, "old.h" that is included
from all c-modules that most likely is present in the overload.lib which
seems to be an overlay loader.


Anyone that has an idea how this thing was built once upon a time?

/Mattis
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