Tektronix 4051/4052/4054 MONOPOLY Game

 

Tektronix 4051/4052/4054 MONOPOLY Game

for 4051 with 32KB RAM, 4052/4052A, and 4054/4054A computers with R12/Fast Graphics ROM PACK and GPIB Flash Drive.


MONOPOLY


I used a Tektronix 4051 computer at my first job in the US Air Force in 1977 - long before the introduction of the Apple II and other personal computers.


I learned how to program in BASIC on that computer and wrote several programs for work after writing several game programs including porting BASIC programs from listings in early microcomputer magazines like BYTE.


In 1979 I began writing a MONOPOLY program in BASIC, but my program used all of the 32KB of RAM in the 4051 for drawing the board - so the game was never working.


I did make printouts of all my 4051 BASIC programs, and in April 2024 someone had asked if any MONOPOLY programs were written in BASIC - and I found my 1979 MONOPOLY program listing and decided to try to finish my program.


Here is the first page of my original MONOPOLY BASIC program - printed on 3M dry silver paper which turns brown if exposed to sunlight:



I scanned and OCRed my original program and when I corrected all the OCR errors I was able to run it and see my original MONOPOLY board layout:



The Tektronix 4051 has vector graphics and dot-matrix text with a vector resolution of 1024x780 - industry leading graphics not only at its introduction in 1975 - but ahead of all the consumer computers including the PC until the IBM 8514 graphics board provided 1024x768 interlaced graphics in 1989!


The Tektronix 4051 could print text anywhere on the screen, so I printed the property labels vertically one letter at a time - but drawing this board with the labels took  about 20 seconds.  My latest game board takes about 15 seconds to draw the much more detailed vector graphics and fonts - using a 4050R12 Fast Graphics ROM Pack that wasn't introduced until I had left the USAF in 1980!


More details and all the files for my full MONOPOLY game are posted in my github repository for all my 4050 BASIC programs plus dozens of 4050 data tapes that I have recovered over the years are organized in other directories:  

My MONOPOLY game files


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