This one is my crowning glory. A full arcade game based on good old Nibbles. Actually, it's based more specifically on Snake Byte, a game that was popular among my classmates in 5th and 6th grade on the Apple //e computers. It was quite a nice game, and when I started programming in Pascal, I figured it wouldn't be too hard to do.

A screenshot from the original Snakebyte:

So, naturally, I started in. I had no idea what I was getting into, let me tell you. I started out with the graphics routines. It was all based sort of on cells. The screen was a big matrix of cells, and the value of the cell decided what should be drawn there -- either a section of snake, a section of wall, the head, the tail, etc. The problem with all this was that I was using the BGI graphics routines (the ones that came with Borland's Turbo Pascal 6.0). BGI is naturally slow, and I was an incredibly poor programmer. The net result was that it was the slowest thing you've ever seen, even on my Dad's 386sx16 (a blindingly fast machine in those days). So I gave up on it for the time being, but it stuck around in my mind.

When I taught myself C about a year later, I remembered snake byte again, and I remarked to myself that it would make a marvelous project for becoming comfortable with C. So I did it. There ain't much more to it. The differences this time were that:

• I was using C (less type checking, more efficient/easier pointers, to name but two of the advantages)
• I used EGA/VGA 80x43/50 text mode (up until this point I hadn't been privy to the ways of the great EGA Register Nirvana, and I had been constantly searching for a way to switch to that text mode. Luckily, BC 3.0 came with a function that would do it for me. Only later did I discover how to do it on my own).
• I had a lot of programming experience by this point
• I had taught myself C the right way (from a book on learning C, as opposed to the way I learned TP: the manuals and context-sensitive help). I actually had some good programming habits from that experience.

A screenshot from The Adventures of Snakey Bob

The results were quite good, if I do say so myself. Snake.exe runs well on any IBM with EGA or VGA, all the way down to the 8088. I should know, since I was stuck using one of the original Compaq Deskpros for an entire year. It did have a retro-fitted VGA video card, though, for which I was thoroughly thankful.

If you'd like to try Snakey Bob, you can download it. Also, if you'd like to see the source code and a level editor, you can email me.