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#                                                               #
# ROBOHACK v0.07 - Arcade Games like Mom used to play           #
#         Baked from scratch by Greg Naughton                   #
#                                                               #
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This is Robohack.  It is called Robohack because it aspires to be a 
clone of the classic Williams arcade game Robotron done in the style 
of Nethack.  Well that, and because I hacked it together.  In order 
to run it you need the ncurses library which is available at:

http://www.gnu.org/software/ncurses/ncurses.html

I wrote this code entirely from scratch (with the exception of a few bits
that I copied from Thomas Munro's Ascii Invaders:

http://www.ip9.org/munro/invaders/ 

for the purpose of learning how to program.  It is my first real program
and first game as well.  

Right now Robohack compiles on Linux only.  (OS X 10.4-6 seems to work)

It is coded entirely in Ansi C using GNU gdb and GNU gcc compiler.  

I release this software under the GNU General Public License.  A copy of 
the license should accompany the software at all times.  You are free
to copy or alter it as you see fit.  Indeed I would be quite happy if
you improved upon it.    

------------------------------------------------------------------
installation instructions -
------------------------------------------------------------------
=========
=_LINUX_=
=========

to compile this program just type 

$ make

in the robohack-0.07 directory.  Then type

$ ./robohack

to run it.

you can also  

$ make clean 

to remove the object files and executable

Robohack was compiled and tested on a linux system with a 2.4.20 kernel
using gnu gcc v2.96 although it should work on most other unices
with gcc as it isn't that complicated or system specific.

--------------------------------------------------------------------
Commands - 
--------------------------------------------------------------------
Spacebar to start,
                     e           i
                     |         y | u
                     |          \|/
                 s---o---f   j---o---l
                     |          /|\
                     |         b | n
                     d           k

                   MOVE:       FIRE:

you should be able to press q or ESC at any time to exit as well:
--------------------------------------------------------------------
this software is provided as is.  It is full of bugs and I full
well know it.  Believe me I'm workin on it.
--------------------------------------------------------------------
_Philosophy_ -  

Now I know that high level languages are all the rage
these days.  and basically that's because people are lazy and there
really aren't that many _good_ coders out there.  They figure hey,
the more it does for them, the better they look.  I'm from the camp,
(if there is a camp) that says that the more that's under the hood
that you cant see, the more likely you are to screw something up.  
Or maybe not you deliberately, but code would be more elegant if all
sections of it were examined by a _human_ programmer rather than 
left to chance.  I like C alot.  C is a lower level language and yes
it can be rather tediious and baroque as Linus calls it.  But C allows
you to really get in there and wrastle with the machine itself.  Or
maybe its because I flunked java and haven't figured out C++ yet, I 
dont know?  

There is a philosophy underlying the developement of Robohack though.
I did everything from scratch.  Got my hands dirty.  Wrote and thought
out every algorithm on my own.  Now I might have done some pretty 
ridiculous things, and it probably took me four times as long to do
it, but hey, that's the way I'm wired.  The point is that if you have
to work out these problems yourself it gives you a unique vantage 
point of understanding the underlying mechanisms of these things, 
such as games and other code.  Even if yours aren't necessarily the
right solutions (hopefully they are though).  That and I'm a diehard
antique buff kind of guy.  I have an overpowering fascination with 
things that are old, slightly dated, and smell of vinyl or varnish.  
They just dont make em like they used to, heh.  

- Greg Naughton, March 2003 -