Painter

This is an old video game written back in 1984 for the Apple II.   It is largely a playground/tech demo for some utility functions I'd written, but it was a lot more fun to turn the tech into a simple little game. The fill routine is... odd, but visually interesting. This is the only place it was ever used.  

About the source

The game was originally written in EDASM, but the source code was lost.  What you see here is a recreation of the original source code using SourceGen and built with Merlin. I needed to replace the original text engine and the whole thing was ported from DOS 3.3 to ProDOS.  

How to play

Start a game by pressing the spacebar.  The game starts:

Use the joystick to move the cursor around the screen while the 'bugs' move about in a random fashion. The goal is to paint over all of the bugs to get to the next board.

You can use button 0 to draw white lines around the bugs. Button 1 begins "painting" at the point of the cursor, filling the enclosed region with paint. If bugs are in the paint, they will die.

You have a limited amount of paint for each board, so one should try to enclose the bugs in tight regions. If the cursor collides with a bug or you run out of paint, you will die. You have three lives for each game.

Playing in the browser

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 Painter directly in the browser

Closing

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.  The sound gets pretty monotonous and I have a plan to fix that. But the current version is true to the original release and should be fully playable.