Variations on a maze
From Maze
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Because the original program is a concise randomized offset to a region of the PETCSII character table, our variations are limited to other such lookups. The code is limited by the characters available in PETSCII, and the concision or elegance of the code is affected by the adjacency of characters, which must otherwise be randomized in a more complex way than an offset. | Because the original program is a concise randomized offset to a region of the PETCSII character table, our variations are limited to other such lookups. The code is limited by the characters available in PETSCII, and the concision or elegance of the code is affected by the adjacency of characters, which must otherwise be randomized in a more complex way than an offset. | ||
| − | == Context: Computer Graphics and Games == | + | == Keyboard and Character Map, Hardware and Software == |
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| + | [[Image:PET_Keyboard.png|thumb|160px|The PET 2001 chicklet keyboard, with the visually complementary arrangement of graphic characters on the keys.]] | ||
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| + | As we will see when exploring visual alternatives below, the PETSCII CHR table contains few related graphical characters the are next to each other and can be easily addressed by offsets -- in fact, many related images (sets of corners, mirror images) appear to have been randomly scattered through the space. This lack of adjacency complicates our ability to generate graphics using a simple offset -- in fact, to use anything but an offset of one, we have to cast the random number generator's float result to an int before multiplying. | ||
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| + | Why is the order of graphical characters in the PETSCII table so haphazard? The answer is that arrangement was dictated, not by logically grouping index numbers (a program-up strategy), but by arranging them visually on the PET keyboard design (a hardware-down strategy). Because the PET 2001 keyboard was a chicklet variant of the QWERTY arrangement, yet lacking the row offsets that QWERTY designer Christopher Sholes originally created for mechanical typewriter levers, it presented a clear canvas for logical groupings of related symbols. | ||
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| + | == Context of Expectations: Computer Graphics and Games == | ||
(NOTE: [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_maze_video_games List of maze video games]) | (NOTE: [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_maze_video_games List of maze video games]) | ||
