How to run ‘Real Programmer’ Mel Kaye's Blackjack for the LGP-30

The story of Mel

SIMH multi-machine simulator by Robert Supnik et al.

bkjck.tx paper tape image from the Computer Museum of the Faculty for Computer Sciences at the University of Stuttgart.

Unfortunately this a plain hex dump in ‘10.4’ format, so it provides no insight into the code. On the bright side, SIMH can read this directly. (On a real computer, a hand-entered bootstrap would read a loader from paper tape which would then read this paper tape.)

Run the LGP-30 simulator (probably called lgp or simh-lgp).

Enter the SIMH commands:

sim> load bkjck.tx
sim> set cpu manual
sim> deposit cpu bp4 1
sim> run 4500

The game displays your cards on the left and the dealer's card on the right, and then asks whether you want another card. For example:

5 - c| 7 - s
| 4 - s
Card? `

The backtick ` (which incidentally comes from SIMH, not the game itself) indicates that the simulated Flexowriter is ready for input.

Type yes if you want another card, and no if you don't; then press the apostrophe ' which is the LGP-30's equivalent of an Enter key.

The game will deal another card and prompt again until you either enter no or reach or exceed 21. Then it will deal the dealer's cards, and report the results.

Card? `yes' 9 - s
Card? `no' | Q - h|
tota1 - 18 |tota1 - 17| score = $1.00

To leave SIMH, press Control-E to stop the simulation and enter:

sim> bye

Stuttgart has more paper tape images.

Bitsavers has LGP-30 documentation under royalPrecision.