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Play My PDP-1 Lunar Lander In Your Browser

A project log for Lunar Lander for the PDP-1

My PDP-1 Replica (PiDP-1) from Obsolescence Guaranteed has arrived and I want to do something cool with it.

michael-gardiMichael Gardi • 09/03/2026 at 16:29•0 Comments

I recently created a version of my NRI 832 emulator that can be run in a browser. It got me thinking that maybe I could get my PDP-1 Lunar Lander up on the Web so that anyone could give it a try without having to download and setup a PDP-1 emulator. I knew that there was a pretty good JavaScript PDP-1 emulator out there and sure enough I found JS-PDP-1.

Lunar Lander runs really well on it, and it feels like a pretty faithful emulation.  To run the program:

  1. Download lunar_lander.rim from the Files section of this project. Click the "Choose File" button and select the lunar_lander.rim file you just downloaded.
  2. Click the READ IN button and Lunar Lander will load and start running. 

The keys to use are:

General game flow:

  1. Boot up the game.
  2. From the Attract Mode NEW GAME screen press one of the control keys. Gameplay starts.
  3. Attempt to make as many Good Landings (H<50,V<100) as fuel allows to increase your score. (Note: there is a 1000 point bonus for landing on all 6 sites.)
  4. When you run out of fuel you will probably crash one last time (for 5 points ;-) unless you were lucky to be very close to a soft landing.
  5. From the GAME OVER screen observe your score then press a control key to go back to 2.

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