Line - a one line arcade game

[patters]

Hi,

I have published Line, a game written in a single line of BASIC. Thanks to Einar Saukas for additional optimisations, suggestions, and fixes.



Download here:
https://patters.itch.io/line

Enjoy!

[ainslec]

Looks fun. A bit flappy bird ish. Clever title too.

[patters]

I wrote this long before Flappy Bird though, in 1996 As I mentioned on itch.io it is based on a game I played at school on a computer which, like the Spectrum, was released in 1982 and had a Z80 CPU. The re-working this year was all about condensing it down to a one liner. The name proved to be quite fitting, but it was already called that.

[Spud]

I don't want to divert this thread at all, but did the Link 480Zs you used at school have a Lode Runner clone installed on them at all? Ours did (this would have been around 1989/90) but I can't find any reference to this piece of software anywhere and I've looked endlessly online over the years for it. Ours was modified so that it swore (letters on screen rather than digitised sound) when he died.

As for Line- bravo! I had lots of fun playing it while on my holiday this week

[patters]

It's a rabbit hole I'm hoping to go down in fact. They did have a game which I'm keen to track down, which potentially matches your description. It was called Barrels and was really good. I guess at its heart it was a Boulderdash/Repton clone, but I think it did have gravity and ladders, so a bit more like Lode Runner. I think it was static though, no running men. Does that ring a bell? I remember it being really difficult. I'd like to find it, but I too have found not a single scrap of information about these computers until the specs emerged just recently. I had started to wonder if they had been some kind of custom machines. What threw me off is that I had remembered the model as 480Z but all the photos showed modern cream coloured casings, whereas my school had the metal cased rugged looking ones which were the early revision, so I thought I was looking at the wrong info.

Had you encountered Line on your school's 480Z's? I remember a guy who had some familiarity with the machines breaking into the listing and I seem to remember that they're a bit like the BBC in that you could have BASIC with inline assembler, and you could certainly breakout into a debugger. It was all incomprehensible to me, but school kids had customised both of these games changing level layouts and physics in Barrels, and changing the line speed and angle in Line for instance. I'm going to start to ask the question on the 380Z Yahoo group which seems to be the only user community. I'm hoping these games were programming examples that RM sold with the systems, but I suppose it's always possible that someone at my school did in fact write them. I first went to that school in Sept 1990, and those computers were replaced the following year.

[patters]

I wrote this long before Flappy Bird though, in 1996

Just got thinking about this - I stated the wrong year, it was 1999. Then I realised I could just look at the tap file creation date even though I've moved it from computer to computer since then, d'oh . And sure enough it was Jan 1999.

[XvarZ]

Nice little game!

First attempt: