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Amstrad CPC Edition of "10 PRINT" maze generator challenge (12 bytes)

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mazecpc 1.2

Maze CPC is a maze generator in 12 bytes for Amstrad CPC664/6128 8-bit computers.

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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.

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 14 12-bytes maze generator, created in a 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.

Update May 2nd, 2023: I resorted to using firmware call for RND to get the random number, saving another 2 bytes. But, the code doesn't run on CPC464 now due to missing firmware call. The 14-byte CPC464 version still exists in maze464.asm.

SSG / arteffect, March 24th 2015

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Amstrad CPC Edition of "10 PRINT" maze generator challenge (12 bytes)

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