New 6809 FLEX Game

Tanrunomad · September 28, 2018

I finally got a working SWTPC 6809 Computer awhile back and decided to write something fun to play on it. It was a nice excuse to learn 6809 Assembly, as well as a language called PL/9. I also made a lot of the game in C, as there were some decent compilers for it. These old SWTPC computers were text-only systems that require a terminal. Many companies made clones of them, such as Smoke Signal Broadcasting and Gimix. The Gimix Ghost 6809 was used by Eugene Jarvis to produce Defender, and with Vid Kidz they made other classics like Robotron and Joust.

I decided to write a version of Cribbage for it, since I love the game and there was no version available for FLEX. It is appropriately called 6809 Cribbage. FLEX is an early OS that runs very fast, uses only 8K of RAM and has tons of commands and utilities for it. The game should also run on the systems mentioned above, as well as other systems that run 6809 FLEX and have 40K of RAM. The game also takes advantage of terminals with cursor addressing facilities with some cool animations and other features. This advanced mode requires 48K.

I wrote the game mostly for myself, since there are probably only 50 or so owners of these machines left in the world and who knows how many of them are Cribbage fans!

There's also some good emulators out there.

Link here: http://tanrunomad.com/swtpc-flex-games/

Enjoy!

Edited September 28, 2018 by Tanrunomad