MacFORTH Code for 1984 Robot-Coding Game 'ChipWits' from 1984 is Now Open Source

Back in the mid-1980s Mark Roth was in 5th grade when the game ChipWits "helped kindle his interest in coding," according to an online biography. ("By middle school, he wrote his first Commodore 64 assembler and by high school he authored a 3D Graphics library for DOS.")

And 40 years later, Slashdot reader markroth8 writes that the programming puzzle/logic game "inspired many people to become professional coders": ChipWits was first released for Mac in 1984, and was later ported to Commodore 64 and Apple II in 1985. To celebrate the game's 40th anniversary, the team behind the new Steam reboot of ChipWits (including its original co-creator Doug Sharp, also of fame for the game King of Chicago) is announcing the recovery and open source release of the original game's source code, written in the FORTH programming language, for both Mac and Commodore 64 platforms.

Recovering data from 40-year old 5.25" and 3.5" disks was a challenge in and of itself, and most of the data survived unscathed! It's interesting to read the 40-year-old code, and compare it to modern game development.
"Our goal for open sourcing the original version of ChipWits is to ensure its legacy lives on," according to the announcement. (It adds that "We also wanted to share an appreciation for what cross-platform software development for 8-bit microcomputers was like in 1984.")

What year was it from again?

[chester_br]

The title could use a little more cowbell from 1984

Old Code

[Bigbutt]

I was packing up getting ready to move again and going through some old CDs. I found my first program I wrote back in the mid-80’s along with a bunch of utilities. I made sure they all were complete and created a “memorabilia” git repository. Then pushed it up to github. :) It’s probably nothing anyone would be interested in but I thought it was cool to locate the old code.

[John]

Re:

[antdude]

Please provide the link. ;)

We're porting the original code to a browser game

[DougDroogSharp]

A few devs have already dived into the code repository to take apart the code for porting. They are looking at jsForth as the target. I was one of the original authors so it is cool to see people hacking at my 40-year-old FORTH code.

Fun code!

[bill_mcgonigle]

I really wish I had known about C=64 Forth compilers when I had one. I was stuck with BASIC and assembler.

I didn't do any Forth until the 90's after college.

It's a neat and useful language for small machines.

Re:

[DougDroogSharp]

Check out the FORTH source code of ChipWits here: https://github.com/chipwits/ch... [github.com]

Re:

[Darinbob]

The source is interesting. You can see the block oriented layout of floppies. Ie, start the code for a block on the first line, then the end of the block might be all blank lines until the next one. Though some seem to have the 16 line blocks (x 64 chars, for 1KB), others seem to be aligned differently. And some bits of assembler-in-Forth which I always found interesting concept.

Time to bring out The Bible

[NoMoreACs]

Starting FORTH.

For those already Enlightened; and for those Seeking Enlightenment:

https://www.forth.com/starting... [forth.com]

Forth!

[LazarusQLong]

Once, back in the mid 80;s, I was given a task to implement a few routines in an existing code, written in FORTH... so I bought Starting FORTH and Thinking Forth, read them over the weekend, and implemented the routines on Monday. Yep, it was that easy a language, for me, no one special, not even an engineer, scientist, or Computer guy, to understand and use.

Great language.