Portable Asteroids on Hypercube Or Transputers

Abstract

A multi-player 3D Asteroids video game designed to be used as a testbed for evaluating controller algorithms was described in [l.] The original version of the game and a separate interactive 3D graphics interface for a human player were implemented, based on CrOS III and VERTEX, on an NCUBE-l hypercube equipped with a parallel Real-Time Graphics board. The Asteroids and interactive graphics interface programs are examples of parallel programs which communicate with each other in a space-shared multi-processor environment. We have successfully ported the Asteroids and the interactive graphics interface to run on NCUBE using ParaSoft EXPRESS. The new version of these programs were further ported to run on a SUN 386i with an add-on Transputer board. We present general design considerations that enable easy migration of communicating parallel programs to any other hardware platform that runs EXPRESS. We also report specific experience of porting Asteroids and an associated interactive player interface program on an NCUBE hypercube to a SUN 386i Transputer-based system, with no modification of codes.

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