QIXSCII (C64)

The original Qix is an early 80's arcade game by Taito and surprised with its unique style, look & feel and its simple but clever game mechanics.

PETSCII on the other hand is the character set that all 8-bit Commodore Computers came preinstalled with and as a result deliver a highly recognizable look, familiar to people who grew up with these computers. Hence the name QIXSCII.

I thought it would be a fun experience to try and develop a Qix-BASIC 10Liner on the Commodore 64. I quickly had to realize that it is not as simple as it looks from outside. 

The major challenge in making a Qix-clone is to detect the area that needs to be filled when closing a line. No chance to do this in 10 lines of code! But I thought this problem is actually very interesting and there must be an easy way to do this. I was  intruiged and opened a Qix-in-BASIC-V2-Coding-Challenge-Thread in the Forum64.de forum to see what other coders would come up with.

This game is the result of these Forum64 thread-discussusions and my various trial-and-error attempts to make it work. The final BASIC listing has about 200 lines of code (REM lines not counted) which is still ok, I think. Halfway in the disucssion I had to make a decision if BASIC Compilers would be allowed to make the game faster (BASIC V2 is terribly slow). Although I kind of see this a bit of cheating I decided to allow Compilers in this particular challenge. After all the game is still MADE in BASIC V2 and one of the conditions was not only to make  a Qix-clone in BASIC V2 but also that the game has to be fun to play.  Not much fun there if the marker is taking half a second to move.

In my case I used the Blitz! compiler and it translated my code flawlessly and without any further intervention.

The D64 disk image contains both, the compiled Blitz version as well as the original BASIC V2 code.

Enjoy!