Games with AI for the monochrome 83+ family
Posted by Xavier on 23 November 2019, 19:18 GMT
Let's dive head first into the several games, all of which have an AI and are written in assembly, which have been part of the retro-features list for a while:
Until 2016, Adam Ziemba worked on a pretty good Connect 4 game for the 83+/83+SE. It's heavily inspired by TICT's relatively popular TI-Con45, and features a fairly good AI, at least in defensive mode. It has two human, one human vs. one calculator, and two calculator player modes, and supports connections of 3, 4 or 5 coins. In fact, this program is two games in one, since there's a Tic-Tac-Toe style game, though the AI is less "smart" in that mode. There's even an option to show the AI's thinking process, something that not every Connect-type game can do; of course, it's disabled by default. Lastly, the README is quite detailed, with a table of contents, a description, key bindings, etc. - it's a pleasure to see :)
Reversi / Othello is Ian Goth's solid implementation of this classic board game. It is provided in three binary versions: no shell, Ion and MirageOS, along with source code and documentation. The black and white graphics are good. Two player and player vs. calc modes are supported, as well as a save / restore feature (including archiving of saved games). All of that fits in ~3 KB, after a round of optimization which shaved hundreds of bytes. A review indicates that some crashes were experienced, so make sure to archive your important data - an advice that's good to follow in almost all cases anyway - if it were to happen to you too :)
BiMbAlL! by Adam "Ashbad" Ruffa is a different type of game, whose aim is to somehow send the ball into the basket to score points, which is not necessarily easy, we tell you, since the AI gets in the player's way. Think Slimeball, our archives contain at least three other implementations of that concept for the 83+ family, the TI-68k family and the Nspire family. This implementation has mostly black and white graphics, but several side features stand out: slow motion replays after a point was scored, a funny (?) commentator, or areas called "Peg" on the sides of the field, which loses the round for both players if the ball lands there; of course, both replays and the commentator can be disabled. No README beyond the archive's page, or source code is provided.
Article written by Lionel Debroux, with input from Adrien "Adriweb" Bertrand.
