WarGames fans, rejoice: [Nick Bild] has rebooted WOPR for real. In his latest hack, the Falcon, he recreates the iconic AI from the 1983 film using a Raspberry Pi 400, a vintage SP0256-AL2 speech chip from General Instrument, and Google’s Gemini LLM. A build to bring us back to the Reagan-era.
Where most stop at visual homage, this one simulates true interaction. The Python script acts as dungeon master for Gemini 2.5 Flash, guiding it to roleplay as the WOPR computer. Keypress sounds click-clack in synchrony with every input. Gemini replies are filtered into allophones, through GI-Pi, [Nick]’s own Python library. The SP0256 then gives it an eerily authentic robotic voice, straight out of 1983.
[Nick] himself is no unfamiliar name to Hackaday. Back in 2020, he hosted a Hack Chat where he talked us through getting from ideas to prototype builds. He practices what he preaches, since he carried out projects like a breadboard 6502 computer, home-automation controlling AI sunglasses, and more silly inventions, like dazzle-proof glasses.
So… shall we play a game? If you’ve ever longed to chat with an 80s military AI about thermonuclear war or tic-tac-toe without doubting you end the world in a blink, start on this build.
Would you like to play a game?
Still got my SPO-256AL2 around here somewhere…
I got it at RS for 14-20? Was going to use it on my C64’s user port, and was even writing the phoneme routines in BASIC, with calls to the chip in ML (for you younguns, you put the ML routines somewhere in memory, then use the BASIC command USR(x) to run it). Then the basement got flooded in one of our “century” floods, which happen every decade, it seems. Never got back to it. Might be fun to fire up the ol’ 64 and see if I can pick up where I left off…
Make it say something once per sec and enter it in the Hackaday 1Hz contest!
Retrocomputer enthusiast George Phillips asked a very retrocomputer question: what old font was actually used to draw the ASCII maps of the US and USSR on David’s computer? His investigation didn’t answer the question, but did show what characters such a font would need:
http://www.48k.ca/wgascii.html