I helped fund the restoration of an old IBM S/34, and now I find myself occasionally thinking about what realtime games you could make run on a 5251 DisplayStation. Tetris would probably be the most engaging. Not sure if you could do it in RPG or COBOL; might require S/34 Assembly. gofundme.com/f/ibm-system-34… piped.video/@crusty.computer en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_Sy…

Oct 1, 2025 · 5:58 PM UTC

Replying to @ID_AA_Carmack
The real question is whether you can run an agent on it
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Replying to @ID_AA_Carmack
Tetris would be fun, wonder if you could do a simple battlezone. Btw: I think you said something awhile back about running Doom on a Cray. Saw a Y-MP for sale at the same warehouse I got my Onyx and there’s a 2nd for parts if you’re interested. Was hard not to buy it myself.
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Replying to @ID_AA_Carmack
There’s always turn-based games, I always found them compelling. I made a turn based simcity that i used to play a lot. vic20listings.freeolamail.co…
Replying to @ID_AA_Carmack
But can it run Doom? 😃
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Replying to @ID_AA_Carmack
checkout FUNLIB, which targets S/34 and S/36. The usual suspects from the Midrange enthusiasts community (AEK, DMcG, MWS, CM and others) were on the hunt for it over several years and it has been found and recovered. This mail thread highlights the past-thinking, discoveries and concerns about going near this material. It would be an opportune time for IBM to make a statement about their position on these artefacts, especially while individuals from that era are still available to provide their firsthand accounts of these systems. wiki.midrange.com/index.php/… rescue.sunhelp.narkive.com/W…
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Replying to @ID_AA_Carmack
Please consider building the game in it and live streaming it. There is nothing I'd rather watch.
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Replying to @ID_AA_Carmack
When I was an IT consultant for a bank towards the end of the 90s I tried to write in PL/I the code for the Tic Tac Toe game on the 3270 terminal of an IBM S/390, using an ISPF panel for the UI, but I never managed to make it work. My career as a game developer ended there 😅
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Replying to @ID_AA_Carmack
There was a nice maze game on one of the PDP-10s at Project Mac. It used the Imlac display terminal for drawing the lines that rendered the maze.
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Replying to @ID_AA_Carmack
Is there more than one 5251? Since the S/34 has multi terminal support, in theory, you could make a multiplayer game. Maybe something like the original SpaceWar!, but with a text grid instead of vector graphics.
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Replying to @ID_AA_Carmack
Awesome toy! But... ...are there any new angles on AI à la Carmack? Did you give up "the AI race" or are you still applying your brain to advance the ASI puzzle?
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Replying to @ID_AA_Carmack
The constraint is the art form. There's something beautifully pure about wondering if you have enough cycles for smooth piece rotation on hardware that predates most programming languages. Would love to see someone attempt 'DOOM but it's green text on a terminal' next. share.sneos.com/compare/2025…
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Replying to @ID_AA_Carmack
Surely not RPG. COBOL maybe.
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Replying to @ID_AA_Carmack
I worked with an S/36 years ago, and the closest thing I can think of to your console is the older BBS that ran at 14.4k baud.
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Replying to @ID_AA_Carmack
I keep asking myself, what if the times of older computers and MS-DOS would not have been evolving towards accessibility and consumerism for the masses, but keep to their scientific goal. Games back then were also hard because were for academia and required intelligence.
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Replying to @ID_AA_Carmack
nice, im still trying to afford a vintage commodore 64 with a 1541 disk drive and monitor. I guess I should up my game hahahaha.
Replying to @ID_AA_Carmack
This is over the target There’s a lot of energy in retro machines If someone started making games that played on amiga 4000 or whatever the ibm version would be Would people pay a couple bucks for it? You can run these on emulators or the real deal Games today are so bad. Could this be the way?
Replying to @ID_AA_Carmack
That sounds like a fascinating project! The possibilities are endless.
Replying to @ID_AA_Carmack
That sounds like a fascinating project! The possibilities with retro tech are endless.
Replying to @ID_AA_Carmack
in FORTRAN, the AI, Bruce Wydner, on a PDP-20 mini computer, Translation, 1978, Bruce invented the overlay to Grammar of Signals beyond Inflection. Today I call my work with his IP, Natural Intelligence, Slated to replace AI, based on the Original Code x.com/i/grok/share/jU9U5Zgms…

Replying to @ID_AA_Carmack
In Cobol, it was impossible; tasks were assigned to each terminal and it switched between them. It was a kind of fake multiprocessing. In ASM, you would need to connect a terminal or some type of output directly to the hardware.
Replying to @ID_AA_Carmack
Y'know all ya gotta do is ask! This is on an AS/400 but it's the same terminal control...
Replying to @ID_AA_Carmack
you know what to do john
Replying to @ID_AA_Carmack
But can it run Crysis?
Replying to @ID_AA_Carmack
Well Colossal Cave for sure! Used to play that on the mainframe in college...rickadams.org/adventure/
Replying to @ID_AA_Carmack
2048 would be an easy lift...
Replying to @ID_AA_Carmack
Old IBM stuff is fascinating to me. Very cool!
Replying to @ID_AA_Carmack
Nethack of course
Replying to @ID_AA_Carmack
the answer is always assembly