mazecpc 1.1

Maze CPC is a maze generator in 14 bytes for Amstrad CPC series 8-bit computers.

history

There is a book called "10 PRINT CHR$ (205.5 + RND (1)); : GOTO 10". Yes that's the title. It's about a small code piece in BASIC language that generates a maze. An interesting read for programmers. It delves into attempts to create it in assembly as small as possible, which seems to have become a trend in Commodore 64 demoscene.

Recently I saw a blog post from Trixter who tried to port it to PC. It eventually got down to 10 bytes.

Tonight I wanted to give it a shot on Amstrad CPC and here it is, 11 bytes14-bytes maze generator, created in couple of hours.

technical notes

I found it very hard to produce a series of "random bits" on a Z80 CPU. There is R register which increases every cycle but naturally deterministic in loops. To keep the code short, however, I relied on it and interrupts to introduce a slight entropy. I'm sure there is room for improvement. Update Dec 29th, 2018: I made the random generator much better by sacrificing 3 more bytes. It's a 14-byte maze generator now.

SSG / arteffect, March 24th 2015