Michael Gardi ported the graphical Lunar Lander to the PDP-1, a machine from 1959, beating out decades of retrocomputing nostalgia anchored in the 1980s. You can play it now in an emulator online at lunarlander.loclx.io.
The history here is worth knowing: most people trace Lunar Lander back to Atari's 1979 arcade cabinet, but the original text-based Lunar Landing Game was written at Digital Equipment Corporation in 1969, on a PDP-8. Gardi reversed the direction, running the graphical descendant on DEC's older, more constrained PDP-1, the same hardware that ran SpaceWar. The PDP-1 predates the PDP-8 by years and has tighter hardware limits, which makes the working graphics the actual story.
One functional PDP-1 still exists, and Gardi wants to run his port on it. The Hackaday 2026 Retrocomputing Contest has three weeks left. Gardi's entry currently sets the floor for how far back contestants are reaching. Read the full project notes to see how he navigated the PDP-1's constraints to render a game that wasn't supposed to exist on it.
[READ ORIGINAL →]