Kevin Karstens did an amazing job of putting together this game. If you check out his website www.karcreat.com you will see all kinds of games Kevin has made.

Just download this installer, it will extract to whatever folder you wish to make. The instructions are right in the opening screen.

Now, I confess, this simulation is not 100% accurate. The program we used to create this game has some limitations and so we were unable to make an exact replica of Computer Space. Following is a list of the inaccuracies:

The rocketship you control does not handle like the original. It should behave like the spaceship in Asteroids, Gravitar, Star Castle, etc. We were unable to replicate the newtonian physics used for those games, so the ship does not drift regardless of heading in our version.

The shots fired from your rocket should be steerable, unfortunately we were not able to get that to function either.

There is no Hyperspace mode. In the original, it was possible to continue gameplay by inverting the background stars and restarting the clock. It didn't add much to the game, it was merely a kind of "extended play" and, to be honest, I don't play with that enabled on my own Computer Space anyway as I feel it just drags out the game. Here is some footage of Hyperspace mode on a real machine.

The score is not hex. What I mean is, the original machine seems to be designed thinking nobody would ever get much of a score on it. As a result, the score only goes up to 15. And to make matters stranger still, the game originally did not show double digits for a score. So how did it display scores above 9? In a weird symbol. I have counted these weird nonesensical symbols and they proceed until you have scored 15 times, then your score returns to 0 on the sixteenth score. However, that is a quirk of the original machine and we wouldn't want that in our simulation anyway.

There are minor cosmetic differences as well such as the screen only flashes when the saucers get hit and not the rocket. I think that might be too many flashes on the screen so I chose not to have that put in. Also, the running lights on the flying saucers should be stationary when the saucers are holding still or travelling vertically. For simplicity's sake, ours rotate their running lights throughout the game.

And for those who might say this game is too hard, I can assure you it is an equivalent challenge to the original. The flying saucers do shoot that well. Our saucers in our simulation don't hold still like the originals do so perhaps ours are slightly more difficult, but there is slightly more room in our starfield as well so these differences balance each other out.