New game uploaded: Core War

rje · Post by **rje** » Fri Jun 11, 2021 4:38 am

Core War

This is a proof of concept of a Core War VM for the X16.

It implements all ICWS'88 opcodes (plus a couple extra); as proof of concept it runs many of the "historical" redcode programs from that period. It has a PETSCII arena view which follows colorized redcode programs. Up to 8 programs may run at a time, and each may have up to 8 processes.

It does not handle operand expression math.

The project is here: https://github.com/bobbyjim/x16-corewar

Submitter

rje

Submitted

06/10/21

Category

Games

rje · Post by **rje** » Fri Jun 11, 2021 4:04 pm

I just spent a morning writing a kind of test framework for debugging the opcode handling.

I just re-learned that C functions on the X16 need to be relatively simple; the fewer params passed, the better.

No worries.

rje · Post by **rje** » Fri Jun 11, 2021 4:14 pm

I've been thinking about different ways of using banked RAM for the ARENA.

(1) Just slop it into banks. This is probably what I'd do. Just occupy as many banks as I want, and have appropriate boundary checking etc.

(2) Use Bank 1 as an index. If I keep the core size to <= 8192, then Bank 1 can indicate which bank each cell is located in. This is more or less a way of skipping one operation in #1 above, but it creates an indirect dereference and in the end it doesn't sound like it's worth the effort. I mean, if the relationship is a simple div to begin with, why store an indirect ref in a table?

rje · Post by **rje** » Fri Jun 11, 2021 4:18 pm

I've been thinking about how to EDIT core warriors. I wonder if I can use our text-editor utility...

rje · Post by **rje** » Fri Jun 11, 2021 11:01 pm

So far, I've debugged MOV in two modes, ADD (and SUB) in three modes, and started on MUL and DIV.

It's slow going.

svenvandevelde · Post by **svenvandevelde** » Sat Jun 12, 2021 7:12 pm

On 6/11/2021 at 6:04 PM, rje said:

I just spent a morning writing a kind of test framework for debugging the opcode handling.

I just re-learned that C functions on the X16 need to be relatively simple; the fewer params passed, the better.

No worries.

It depends which c compiler you use.

rje · Post by **rje** » Mon Jun 14, 2021 2:20 am

Added a CLI to help me debug a bit better.

svenvandevelde · Post by **svenvandevelde** » Mon Jun 14, 2021 7:29 pm

17 hours ago, rje said:

Added a CLI to help me debug a bit better.

What is a CLI?

Ed Minchau · Post by **Ed Minchau** » Mon Jun 14, 2021 7:47 pm

18 minutes ago, svenvandevelde said:

What is a CLI?

Command Line Interface.

Elektron72 · Post by **Elektron72** » Mon Jun 14, 2021 7:47 pm

18 minutes ago, svenvandevelde said:

What is a CLI?

CLI stands for Command-Line Interface.