Palm OS Core War
I just had my 28th birthday, and while thinking about things, I remembered a program I was involved with almost twelve years ago, when I was a high school student at a summer program in Valdosta, Georgia called the Governor's Honors Program, or GHP for short.
I was in the Math/Computer Science program, and one of the tasks we had was to write entries for a CoreWars competition. This is a game that was pretty big in the mid-90s where you ran programs in a simulated computer core that fought to kill all the other processes. My instructor, Danny Sharpe, had written his own version in Turbo Pascal, and we were using it that summer as part of our class.
If you go to http://garbo.uwasa.fi/pc/educgames.html, you'll find the app we were using, cw30.zip. It's kinda odd that twelve years later, I'd still be working on something called "CW", and even more odd that I'd be able to find a program I helped modify on the net after all that time. I'm actually mentioned in the release notes; even then, I was working on improving development tools. :)
Where is this leading? Well, after digging all of this up, I went searching for a Palm OS version of Core Wars. PalmGear had nothing that matched that term, and Google wasn't much help either. So, here's a challenge to all of you game programmers out there. I'd love to see a Palm OS version of this venerable app.
A few design ideas: the RedCode files (the source for the attack programs) would live as memo pad entries, in their own category. When launched, the CoreWars simulator would let you pick a set of apps to place in the environment. The core would default to 8000 words with random program placement. Multiple copies of each app should be allowed to be placed. The core itself can be drawn on screen using a 80x100 bitmap, with each dot either neutral or the color matching the last app to modify it. There's lots of other ideas -- this is just a start.
However, you don't want me working on this. Sure, it would be fun to write, but I really don't need the distraction just yet... let me hack away at CW for Palm OS V9 for a while first.
Finally, a story about my CoreWars apps. While I really liked working the system, I never was too good at making programs that would attack other apps. So, I decided to pervert the setup. The CoreWars simulator showed the memory core using a character grid on the PC's screen. I wrote a "plotter" application that would throw out bombs in a set pattern, usually to produce some cool display on the screen. The first one I did wrote the text "Hello, World!" by modifing the appropriate addresses, while the last version actually plotted a peace sign, then gave up.
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Copyright © 2004 Benjamin L. Combee
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The views expressed on this website/weblog are those of mine alone and do not necessarily reflect the views of PalmSource or Metrowerks.
qwertYAK / frobnovich
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