Dave Plummer also shared a driver for the monitor’s ‘completely proprietary, unbuffered, and unterminated interface.’
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There’s something extremely alluring about vector displays for tech enthusiasts beyond a certain age. Recently, legendary Windows developer Dave W Plummer got hold of a prime example of this type of monitor, the HP1345a, and set about making it usable with a PC via USB serial connection. Plummer has been busy, already showcasing a vector demo andan Asteroids clone on the HP monitor, best known for its starring role in the classic 1983 movie War Games .
I managed to get hold of an HP1345A, the vector display used to film the movie War Games. I've spent the last couple of days interfacing with it and coding for, it, and here's an early demo!Code at https://t.co/GmnnSpoNLj pic.twitter.com/L2PX5PbCn5 February 2, 2026
Above, you can see that Plummer managed to crack this nut successfully, then showcase the display in action with a vector-tastic animated computer graphics demo. But look at the wiring spaghetti that is required to connect the HP1345a to the ESP32‑S3 microcontroller, and then to the PC.
The ancient HP ‘War Games’ monitor “uses a completely proprietary, unbuffered, and unterminated interface: D0-D15 data lines and then two handshake lines: ReadyForData and DataValid,” explains the developer. “I decided to use an ESP32 to interface with it. I wired up the 16 data lines and the two handshake lines to free GPIOs, then set about writing code to ‘bridge’ data from the serial port to the HP.”
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Reference reading
- https://www.tomshardware.com/monitors/SPONSORED_LINK_URL
- https://www.tomshardware.com/monitors/legendary-windows-dev-codes-demos-and-games-for-ancient-war-games-monitor-interfaces-with-the-hp1345a-vector-display-using-an-esp32-microcontroller#main
- https://www.tomshardware.com
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