This is a small bootloader which is/was trying to implement a snake clone in the 512 bytes of a bootloader.
- handles keyboard interrupts
- moves in a fixed interval
- the snake has the ability to grow
The generated source file has 498 bytes. The BIOS of a PC loads only the first 510 bytes of code into the RAM to execute, the last 2 bytes are AA 55 to indicate that the preceding bytes are, indeed, a bootloader. It is therefore quite problematic to add the last missing features, which are:
- catch out-of-bounds errors
- generation of additional points for the snake to eat
It might make sense to increase the speed of movement and strip the code which adds the snake length and in turn add the code for the point generation.
Easy!
- download an already built package from the "builds" branch
- install Bochs
- load the bochsrc.bxrc file in Bochs
- "play"
The build process relies on quite old software.
- ml.exe, the MASM compiler of Microsoft (included in Visual Studio installations)
- dmc.exe, the C(++) compiler of Digitalmars
- link.exe, the 16-bit linker of Microsoft (extract with 7-zip or similiar).
- dd.exe for windows from chrysocome.net
Either add them to your path or drop them into the kernel directory, open the project in Visual Studio and build (F6).
Afterwards you can run the file with the included bochsrc.bxrc in Bochs.