cursed snake

A tiny snake game using curses.

Do you need a manual?

This is still work in progress. So far, it features a scoring system, clock and randomly placed obstacles. Of course it handles any terminal size, as long as it's not smaller than 80x25. Resizing the terminal while running is not handled ... it's a silly idea trying to resize a board game in action. Just don't do it :). Windows users: If you want bigger boards, create a link to the executable. In the link properties, you can configure the window size (among other things).

Colors are obviously a matter of being lucky with curses .. this screenshot above looks ok, so how do you like this version of good old xterm?

Thanks to PDcurses (and a tiny bit of platform specific tweaking), it even works fine on windows:

... as well as on DOS (this looks crazy on a 1920x1200 display):

... here we can have this old MS DOS smiley as the snake head -- great! :)

Planned

working on a highscore list. That's the only thing still missing from my idea of a first release.

Building from source

Just type make. You will end up with a binary in the bin subdir.

(If not, you're missing development files for curses -- on Linux, this is normally ncurses -- or they are in a nonstandard location. Set your CFLAGS and LDFLAGS environment variable so that curses headers and libs are found.)

some more options to make:

• USELTO=0 (defaults to 1): Enable or disable link time optimizations
• GCC32=1 (defaults to 0): On x86_64, build an x86 binary
• DEBUG=1 (defaults to 0): Build with debugging info (-g3), disable optimizations (-O0)

Building with llvm / clang

Try LDFLAGS=-fuse-ld=gold make CC=clang.

Cross-compiling for DOS

You need a DJGPP toolchain. Install it, then compile the PDcurses lib with it. pdcurses.a goes in the lib directory of your toolchain (e.g. /usr/local/i586-pc-msdosdjgpp/lib), named libpdcurses.a. Place the header curses.h in the include directory of your toolchain (e.g. /usr/local/i586-pc-msdosdjgpp/include). Then, the following command will do:

make CROSS_COMPILE=i586-pc-msdosdjgpp- PLATFORM=dos strip

To make it run correctly under plain DOS, you need a DPMI server (Windows 9x already provides one). DJGPP links the .exe with a stub that tries to run CWSDPMI.EXE if no DPMI services are detected. This will not work because cursed snake uses the privileged HLT instruction to save power when running under plain DOS and CWSDPMI puts the code in ring 3. First, you have to download the CWSDPMI binary distribution from here. Then there are two possibilities to have cursed snake run in ring 0, so it can use HLT:

1. Modify the stub linked by DJGPP to load CWSDPR0.EXE instead:

   /[...]/i586-pc-msdosdjgpp/bin/stubedit bin/csnake.exe dpmi=CWSDPR0.EXE

   With this, the CWSDPR0.EXE must be in the same directory as csnake.exe to run it.

2. Replace the stub with CWSDSTR0.EXE:

   /[...]/i586-pc-msdosdjgpp/bin/exe2coff bin/csnake.exe

   cat /path/to/CWSDSTR0.EXE bin/csnake >bin/csnake.exe

   The resulting binary will run on its own even in plain DOS, because it has the CWS DPMI server embedded.

Prerelease binaries

So you don't have a GNU toolchain on your machine but would like to try this out just for fun? Here are some builds (redone from time to time):

• Windows 32bit (.exe)
• Linux 32bit (ELF binary)
• Linux 64bit (ELF binary)
• MS-DOS / Win 9x (.exe)