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Now try to create a routine that generates mazes with no dead ends on a system with 128 bytes of total RAM. That 128 bytes includes stack. No graphics memory a
by vardump 7y ago
Now try to create a routine that generates mazes with no dead ends on a system with 128 bytes of total RAM.
That 128 bytes includes stack. No graphics memory at all.
- pubby 7y agoThat's what I did :) I coded my maze generators in 6502 assembly - the same CPU the Atari uses. Mine was for the NES, which is more powerful than the Atari (2KB vs 128B of RAM, for example), but I think I know what I'm talking about.
- vardump 7y agoProgramming these old constrained 8-bitters is great fun.
- lowtolerance 7y agoI haven’t seen the actual code they’re discussing in this article, but the interesting part isn’t that this was done on a system with very little RAM. From the sound of things, it works like a finite state machine. You can represent a whole lot of possible states with 128 bytes of RAM. Like, an astrologically large number of states - 2^1024, to be exact. The ability to work within the Atari’s memory constraints isn’t what’s so interesting about this algorithm, it’s that the lookup table driving the algorithm is inscrutable.