The Maze Hack Project

Update, 2008-04-21: More recent stuff can be found in another place.

The Maze Hack Project is a sort of a personal learning effort of mine, and I don't expect the others to understand the "point". There's no point... This is mostly just a programming excercise, done on my spare time.

In this project, I plan to make following things:

• Maze generation and solving, using depth-first search. This was already invented and it's working fine in theory and practice.
• Maze generator and animated solver for Commodore 64, in Assembly.
• 3D graphical explorer of the maze with all bells and whistles, using SDL and OpenGL.

Simple C implementation

The C implementation was made with idea that it'd be as simple and efficient as possible, and it'd be easy to turn into assembler program - ie, it'd not use too much of C standard library.

The C version implements a random number generator and stack, and uses depth-first graph traversal. All of those can be implemented fairly effortlessly in assembler, though they might sound pretty tough at first =)

The code is so self-contained that I succeeded in compiling the code with cc65 (all I needed to do was to work around the lack of time() function...) and it worked fine. IIRC, on C64, the code took about 10 seconds to generate the maze and a second to solve it. (Multiple passes with several DFSes and such make the generation slow...)

Commodore 64 version

This is nowhere near working. All I've done is the logo loader - I wanted to learn how to read stuff from disk using Kernal routines =)

The program is being written with xa65 cross-assembler in mind, but it should be compileable with any other assembler with small changes.

3D version

The 3D maze explorer, glMaze, is being written in C++, but I promise not to make it too ugly. (I've been using mostly Java previously so I hope I know what cool C-like OO code looks like =)

The program uses SDL for window management and input handling. Thus, it will work in many OSes (it's being developed in Linux, of course).

Some screenshots from the version under development:

• Whee! It runs! 2001-08-28 (The first time I got it to "work"...)

Downloads

Nothing much here yet =(

• C64 program (gzipped C64 program file)
• C64 program (gzipped .d64 disk image)
• C source code
• Diary of changes (lots of hopefully interesting comments =)
• C/C++ tarballs
• Life
• Universe
• Lost thoughts

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Last modified: $Date: 2008-04-21 18:08:16 +0300 (ma, 21 huhti  2008) $