Crobots is a

programming game A programming game is a video game that incorporates elements of computer programming, enabling the player to direct otherwise autonomous units within the game to follow commands in a domain-specific programming language, often represented as a ...

released for the first time by Tom Poindexter in December, 1985 as

Shareware Shareware is a type of proprietary software that is initially shared by the owner for trial use at little or no cost. Often the software has limited functionality or incomplete documentation until the user sends payment to the software developer. ...

. It is an MS-DOS program for IBM PC and compatibles and was developed on x86-based Unix systems. The

robot A robot is a machine—especially one Computer program, programmable by a computer—capable of carrying out a complex series of actions Automation, automatically. A robot can be guided by an external control device, or the robot control, co ...

s are controlled by a program written in a stripped-down version of C. The robot's mission is to seek out and destroy other robots, each running different programs. The robots can be controlled in order to move around the battlefield, scan the environment to find enemies and fire at enemies using a cannon. Crobots borrows the concept used from the game RobotWar that ran on the original

Apple II Apple II ("apple Roman numerals, two", stylized as Apple ][) is a series of microcomputers manufactured by Apple Computer, Inc. from 1977 to 1993. The Apple II (original), original Apple II model, which gave the series its name, was designed ...

computer. Robots were programmed in a proprietary programming language that was interpreted and included a real-time view of the game as it was played. In October, 2013, Poindexter released the source code of Crobots under the GPLv2 free software software license, license.

Clones

There have been many Crobots Clone (computing), clones made. However, very few of them are

compiler In computing, a compiler is a computer program that Translator (computing), translates computer code written in one programming language (the ''source'' language) into another language (the ''target'' language). The name "compiler" is primaril ...

and

virtual machine In computing, a virtual machine (VM) is the virtualization or emulator, emulation of a computer system. Virtual machines are based on computer architectures and provide the functionality of a physical computer. Their implementations may involve ...

at the same time; for example there are

Java Java is one of the Greater Sunda Islands in Indonesia. It is bordered by the Indian Ocean to the south and the Java Sea (a part of Pacific Ocean) to the north. With a population of 156.9 million people (including Madura) in mid 2024, proje ...

clones that use

JVM A Java virtual machine (JVM) is a virtual machine that enables a computer to run Java programs as well as programs written in other languages that are also compiled to Java bytecode. The JVM is detailed by a specification that formally descri ...

and

C++ C++ (, pronounced "C plus plus" and sometimes abbreviated as CPP or CXX) is a high-level, general-purpose programming language created by Danish computer scientist Bjarne Stroustrup. First released in 1985 as an extension of the C programmin ...

clones that use a standard

Microsoft Microsoft Corporation is an American multinational corporation and technology company, technology conglomerate headquartered in Redmond, Washington. Founded in 1975, the company became influential in the History of personal computers#The ear ...

compiler. Proper clones have the same intrinsic functions as the original Tom Poindexter version; sometimes however the direction of angles is changed to match the standard C library's trigonometric functions. The most recent clones are Crobots64 and Netrobots. Crobots64 by Marco Zora has a

-subset compiler and a

with a graphical interface. New capabilities in this clone are cooperation between robots of the same species, the unlimited number of concurrent robots, the floating point math functions and the speed of the virtual CPU. In contrast, Netrobots can run over a network with each robot running in a separate process, and each robot can be written in a different programming language.

References

1985 video games Programming games Open-source video games Freeware games Commercial video games with freely available source code Video games developed in the United States {{programming-videogame-stub

Clones

See also

References