Crobots is a programming game released for the first time by Tom Poindexter in December, 1985 as

Shareware Shareware is a type of proprietary software that is initially shared by the owner for trial use at little or no cost. Often the software has limited functionality or incomplete documentation until the user sends payment to the software developer ...

. It is an MS-DOS program for IBM PC and compatibles and was developed on x86-based Unix systems. The

robot A robot is a machine—especially one programmable by a computer—capable of carrying out a complex series of actions automatically. A robot can be guided by an external control device, or the control may be embedded within. Robots may be c ...

s are controlled by a program written in a stripped-down version of C. The robot's mission is to seek out and destroy other robots, each running different programs. The robots can be controlled in order to move around the battlefield, scan the environment to find enemies and fire at enemies using a cannon. Crobots borrows the concept used from the game

RobotWar ''RobotWar'' is a programming game written by Silas Warner. This game, along with the companion program ''RobotWrite'', was originally developed in the TUTOR programming language on the PLATO system in the 1970s. Later the game was commerciali ...

that ran on the original

Apple II The Apple II (stylized as ) is an 8-bit home computer and one of the world's first highly successful mass-produced microcomputer products. It was designed primarily by Steve Wozniak; Jerry Manock developed the design of Apple II's foam-m ...

computer. Robots were programmed in a proprietary programming language that was interpreted and included a real-time view of the game as it was played. In October, 2013, Poindexter released the

source code In computing, source code, or simply code, is any collection of code, with or without comments, written using a human-readable programming language, usually as plain text. The source code of a program is specially designed to facilitate the wo ...

of Crobots under the GPLv2

free software Free software or libre software is computer software distributed under terms that allow users to run the software for any purpose as well as to study, change, and distribute it and any adapted versions. Free software is a matter of liberty, no ...

license A license (or licence) is an official permission or permit to do, use, or own something (as well as the document of that permission or permit). A license is granted by a party (licensor) to another party (licensee) as an element of an agreeme ...

Clones

There have been many Crobots clones made. However, very few of them are

compiler In computing, a compiler is a computer program that translates computer code written in one programming language (the ''source'' language) into another language (the ''target'' language). The name "compiler" is primarily used for programs that ...

and

virtual machine In computing, a virtual machine (VM) is the virtualization/emulation of a computer system. Virtual machines are based on computer architectures and provide functionality of a physical computer. Their implementations may involve specialized hardw ...

at the same time; for example there are

Java Java (; id, Jawa, ; jv, ꦗꦮ; su, ) is one of the Greater Sunda Islands in Indonesia. It is bordered by the Indian Ocean to the south and the Java Sea to the north. With a population of 151.6 million people, Java is the world's List ...

clones that use

JVM A Java virtual machine (JVM) is a virtual machine that enables a computer to run Java programs as well as programs written in other languages that are also compiled to Java bytecode. The JVM is detailed by a specification that formally describes ...

and C++ clones that use a standard

Microsoft Microsoft Corporation is an American multinational technology corporation producing computer software, consumer electronics, personal computers, and related services headquartered at the Microsoft Redmond campus located in Redmond, Washing ...

compiler. Proper clones have the same intrinsic functions as the original Tom Poindexter version; sometimes however the direction of angles is changed to match the standard C library's trigonometric functions. The most recent clones are Crobots64 and Netrobots. Crobots64 by Marco Zora has a C++-subset compiler and a

with a graphical interface. New capabilities in this clone are cooperation between robots of the same species, the unlimited number of concurrent robots, the floating point math functions and the speed of the virtual CPU. In contrast, Netrobots can run over a network with each robot running in a separate process, and each robot can be written in a different programming language.

References

1985 video games Programming games Open-source video games Freeware games Commercial video games with freely available source code Video games developed in the United States {{programming-videogame-stub

Clones

See also

References