Assembly, ASCII, and a Game!

It's a been a while seen my last .plan post and I figured it was time to update a little of what I've been working on...

So Electrical and Computer Engineering has been keeping me fairly busy (I'm in the middle of finals right now), but I managed to sneak in making a game for one of my final projects - and it got done!

For my Computer Organization class I wrote a Theseus and the Minotaur clone entirely in 68k assembly. Which to my surprise was hundreds, if not thousands of lines of assembly. All written in Notepad ;).

The real trick was the display, and represention of the mazes. My partner in the project was kind enough to get a hex keypad (a square 4x4 keypad) hooked up and debounced so we could use it as our controller.

And of course - pics!




Click to see larger pictures (if you really want to).

Of course pics don't do it justice really.

Check out a movie of me playing (and beating my own maze :P).

Some of you might think it was a lame idea to do a clone. But I chose to do it for two reasons.
1. It was very, very simple game (in terms of rules of game play).
2. I could make my own mazes
3. Try out maze designs that are NOT in the original set of mazes - which you can find here.

The last two points were lots of fun, because I had already beaten most of the game already (with the exception of the last level). Trying out new designs, creating my own, and have a working platform for it while playing on an external keypad was really cool.

But the sad part of this story is the hardware target was a very specific board created by the university. So ports to any other systems is pretty much out of the way (considering the that display was the most difficult part). And not only that, but there's rumour that the hardware is going to get the bucket and get replaced by newer hardware (I think the Altera DE2 - with the NiosII processor).

This was one of two final projects I was working on - the other was a web server for unix (and yes - we had to create a web server). I thought that was pretty lame considering there's a much better alternative such as Apache compared to what we were developing (as a class). We decided to mod up the server a bit - and make into a web server that could run simulations (such as hspice or matlab) on the server through POST requests - and then e-mail back the results in a tar ball. It worked, but since we've deviated from the recommended list of Web Server Features - they may not appreciate it as much as we do.

Torque you say?

Of course I've been working on Android Arena for quite some time now - but school has been keeping me busy (and any trace of a social life). I've also been taking a break for the past few weeks and slowly working my way through Ed's new book (which is fantastic). But slowly and surely the game is coming together, and designs and ideas for implementation are flourishing.

My next final: Computer Organization ;)

- Eric