To run Quinti-Maze on a Mac, Windows or (hopefully) Linux computer:
- Install Rust
- Install the SDL2 libraries
- cd to
quinti-maze-2022/sim cargo run --release
In 1982 I wrote a program that was published in Byte Magazine. To celebrate the forty years that have past since, I decided to rewrite it today, in embedded Rust.
I entered this program in the Byte Magazine games contest at the urging of my mother. I wasn't optimistic that it would win, but it squeaked in. The prize was $65 a page for the article, including the listing. This was the first time, but not the last, where I regretted not putting in more comments. That works out to almost a thousand 2022 dollars.
Even more lucrative was the callout on the first page where I offer to put the program on disk for $5. I must have gotten dozens of those.
The Applesoft BASIC source for the original program can be seen here. If you have trouble understanding it, don't feel bad, I can't easily understand it either. I was able to get it to work in an Apple II emulator.
When I wrote this, I had no notion how to generate a maze, so I did the best I could; I randomly added a lot of doors and hoped there would be a path out.
Here's the target hardware for the 2022 version, all stuff I had laying around from my escape room prop hobby.
The feather is 120 times faster than the Apple II by raw clock speed, not to mention being a 32 bit processor instead of the 8 bit 6502. The feather's 160k of RAM is not too far off. The 512kb of flash storage is more than three Apple II floppy disks.
The Apple II HiRes graphics mode had a resolution of 280 by 192 pixels, so this screen is in the right ballpark.
For the 2022 version I plan to implement an actual maze generation algorithm. Luckily, I'm not the first to want such a thing so I have code to reference.
For getting pixels onto the screen I can use the excellent embedded-graphics crates. Someone has already written a driver for the screen, so I'm just on the hook for the touchscreen driver. The embedded graphics folks also provide a desktop simulator, which will speed up development a bit.