Stay at Home Edition: Maze War for Olivetti M10 and NEC PC-8201A (2016)

Implementing a 3D dungeon crawler in MS BASIC for RetroChallenge 2016/01.

Maze War for Olivetti M10 and NEC PC-8201A
It was to be a networked first person shooter, but it became a 3D dungeon crawler, after all.

In 1983 Kyocera introduced a remarkable portable computing platform, which was marketed by various vendors as by Tandy as the TRS-80 Model 100, by NEC as the PC-8201 and PC-8201A, by Olivetti as the M10, and by Kyocera itself as the Kyotronic 85. These machines, which I like to refer to as the “Kyocera siblings”, were about the same, but not exactly, differing both in hardware specs and in their respective implementation of MS BASIC (the last one, Bill Gates was actually coding for). Quite a success with in-the-field workers like journalists and with about 6 millions units sold for the TRS Model 100 alone, these were about as numerous as nowadays the stockpile of toilet rolls for a family of four. Therefore, these were rather easy to obtain as a retro machine and I got me two of them, namely a an Olivetti M10 and a NEC PC-8201A.

RetroChallenge is a loose, not too serious gathering/competion twice a year, where folks do things with retro computers or consoles over a month and report about this in order to let others participate in their efforts. Eager to play around with the new toys, the choice for my first participation in RetroChallenge was an easy one. And it was also the first time, I got to mess around with BASIC after a pause of about 30 years. While originally intended as a full-fledged, networked implementation of the historical first person shooter, BASIC and the time constraints got me only that far. Eventually, it became a first person dungeon crawler with a pseudo-3D view port and a static map, running — while not exactly in realtime — at reasonable speeds. (This involved both high and low level approches, like JIT compiling display data to byte code for a small runtime to send low level display data over the internal serial port to the LCD controllers, which also overcame differences in the various dialects of MS BASIC found in these machines.)

Have at least a look at episode 1, where we have a closer look at the various incarnations of the Kyocera siblings.

Start reading: “Maze War for Olivetti M10 and NEC PC-8201A”…