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Comment by yebyen | Hacker News Reader

Your snake game doesn't even have food for the snake to eat? The snake just grows without eating, until the head collides with the tail somewhere? Pssh, amateur hour...

/s (Just kidding this is actually super cool.)

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My first thought was to make random sectors of the first hard drive the "food"... For better or for worse, this stuff really brings me back to my teens. Nice job!

You just reminded me of an old game that made "snow" for the screen by copying a specific location on the disk into video memory.

It's Tron-ish (the post says Tron, where did you read snake?) :P

It's a fair assumption to make, as the difference between Tron and Snake is effectively just single player vs multiplayer.

No it isn't. In TRON you leave a trail behind. In Snake, you grow as you eat and drag your body along the path you crawled. TRON's trail is static, Snakes body is dynamic.

I said effectively.

> TRON's trail is static, Snakes body is dynamic.

And that difference only exists to support the single player vs multiplayer dynamic. If Snake left a Tron tail then it would be a very short, unfun experience. If Tron didn't leave a permanent trail then matches would last too long.

> And that difference only exists to support the single player vs multiplayer dynamic

Maybe the single player vs multiplayer difference only exists to support the different tail mechanics.

In the middle ground, NIBBLES.BAS was snake and had a competitive 2 player mode plus a selection of levels/arenas.

So then OP created single-player Tron instead of Snake?

Woops... I skimmed the article and watched the 30MB GIF

Tron is a great game for fitting into a very small space. Back in high school I spent a lot of time optimizing Tron on the TI-82 to fit in as few bytes as possible. It looks like I got it down to 152 bytes: (only about 80 bytes of actual Z80 assembly code)

https://www.ticalc.org/archives/files/fileinfo/227/22747.htm...

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