Simulate Talking With WOPR From the Movie WarGames

Falcon simulates interacting with WOPR from the 1983 movie WarGames by using a Raspberry Pi 400, a vintage General Instrument SP0256-AL2 speech chip, and the Google Gemini LLM. The cool-retro-term terminal emulator completes the effect.

Shall we play a game?

Now that is how we are really meant to talk to artificially superintelligent machines!

How It Works

This Python script instructs a Google Gemini 2.5 Flash LLM to role play as if it were WOPR from the movie WarGames. As the user types (and as LLM responses come in), a sound is played mimicking the keypress sounds from the movie. Responses are also spoken in an appropriately robotic-sounding voice through an SP0256-AL2 speech chip from 1981 using my GI-Pi Python library. The lexconvert utility converts text strings into a list of allophone codes compatible with the chip. The cool-retro-term terminal emulator, with a custom profile, simulates interacting with WOPR on a 1980s CRT computer monitor resembling the one in the movie.

Media

Bill of Materials

• 1 x Raspberry Pi 400
• 1 x SP0256-AL2 speech chip and audio amplification circuit (see GI-Pi)
• 1 x USB speaker
• 1 x Speaker with TRRS jack

About the Author

Nick A. Bild, MS