Deflection

This is an old board game written back in 1987 for the Apple II. Patterned after chess and an old physical board game of the same name, the idea is to place a collection of reflective panels, beam splitters and light-pipes to protect your four 'key' blocks.  On each turn one can move one piece any number of unblocked squares north, south, east or west and then rotate the piece. Alternatively, a player may opt to move and fire a laser from the back row. If a laser hits a unit from an unprotected direction, the piece is destroyed. Play continues back and forth until one player has lost all of their 'key' blocks.

In 2024, the original source code to the game was unearthed and the original programmer decided to fix up the project enough so that it was playable again. The resulting source code is available on github and a prebuilt binary can be downloaded here.

The game is contained in an Apple II ',po' format 140k disk image file which can be read by most emulators or written to a 5.25" floppy disk and run on a physical device.  It could also be used with tools like Floppy EMU and CFFA to run on physical hardware.  

Thanks to the great work by Chris Torrence and Michael Morrison, one can run this game directly in your browser via their TypeScript Apple II emulator (Apple2TS). 

• Play Deflection directly in the browser

The source code is a work in progress.  The original assembly had almost no comments and the memory layout was undocumented.  The code is actively being updated to address some of these limitations.  It is available on github.  Key features being worked on include:

• Addition of sound
• Switching from joystick input to keyboard input
• Experiments with a computer player