Like many other budding programmers, I wrote my share of games. Most of them involved guessing numbers, but I also wrote racing games, card games, and the usual. That was until I bought my first computer mouse.
Early computers didn’t come with a mouse. It was an extra you purchased. (I wrote about my early mouse experiences over a year ago.) The Microsoft Mouse manual came with a programmer’s guide, which was common back then. That way you could write your own mouse-based programs or just copy down some of the BASIC programs found in the manual.
Being either bored or curious, I set out to code my own mouse-based game. Not only that, I chose to write the game in my favorite programming language at the time, assembly.
Assembly language is the same programming code God used to create the universe. I’m not being blasphemous; Assembly is low-level, atomic/genetic code that the processor uses directly. The resulting program runs very fast and is extremely small. The only downside is that it takes about ten times longer to write the code. Apparently I had plenty of time back then.
I wanted to code a pop-up window type of program, which was popular back then. My goal was to write a sliding tile game. The Mac came with such a game as a desk accessory. I would write one for the PC’s text screen, a game you could play with the mouse.
Figure 1 illustrates the results of my efforts, the Mouse Tiles game in action.
Figure 1. Mouse Tiles running in DOSBox on the Mac.
I never did code the thing as a pop-up or memory-resident program. It ended up being only 10K in size and it ran very fast. The only problem with Figure 1 is that the program has crashed the DOSBox emulator. I don’t know why, perhaps because the mouse function calls are too primitive. So I can’t click on any tiles or on the control menu and I can’t quit, yet Figure 1 shows what the game looked like.
It doesn’t really matter whether the game is playable today or not. One of the things I learned back then was that you just can’t randomly assign tiles in a tile game. When you do, it’s possible to set the tiles in a pattern than cannot be solved. I don’t believe I ever addressed that issue in the program, nor did I ever actually distribute the game beyond my circle of friends.
I still have the source code to Mouse Tiles, which you can view by clicking this link. According to the source code file, I wrote this program back in 1986. Career-wise, I was a freelancer at that time, having just left my job at the computer book publishing house and before I was hired on as the Editor at Byte Buyer magazine, later known as ComputorEdge.
