Lance Robinson wrote:
"I wrote a few very simple arcade games in Z-80 assembler for the Exidy Sorcerer...It was a spin on the old robot-chase game where the robots moved one cell closer to your piece every n seconds."


i remember the exidy soccerer in the byte magazine advertisements in the old days.

the game you describe is similar to the piranah game for the mini-term associates merlin card that I disassembled. you had a square screen board and had to "swim" from the left and right side through the piranah infested waters to gain points.

what struck me as great about this code was the very independent nature of the piranah's behaviour. as i disassembled the code (1981), i discovered that the programmer used a great scheme (now would be called object oriented programming) for orchestrating the behavior of each piranah.

at a random rate, new piranah data blocks would be linked into the linked list data structure with random-ranged attributes describing that piranah's life, sensing range, speed, and interest/hunger. as a piranah expired, its data block would be unlinked from the linked list and made available for subsequent random births.

this scheme made the number and behaviour of piranah quite unpredictable. it was probably an implementation ahead of its time. 15 years later while studing simulation algorithms, i really came to respect that they had accomplished on such a little noticed piece of software in 1981.

its the only archade game i'd have any interest in recreating on a pc.

duh