Silicon Castles

chess playing genies rule OK

Gosh, this is an uninteresting dream. There's a table, and a chessboard, and a chair which you're sitting in, and that's about it. If you're going to play chess, shouldn't you have an opponent? And what's that on the table?

Silicon Castles is a game I wrote for the 2001 Interactive Fiction Competition. It's a Z-machine abuse and a test of my C compiler for the Z-machine; it's a chess game wrapped up in an adventure game.

The chess engine core is Marcel van Kervinck's MSCP. This is compiled using Volker Barthelmann's VBCC C compiler, for which I wrote a Z-machine back end. Assorted other code came from the ELKS project.

Apparently MSCP is rather weak, but even on its easiest setting the genie beat me every time.

Silicon Castles is licensed under the GNU Public License.

castles.z5.gz (81.4 kB)

Version 1.1 'Nearly Working' binary for the game. It should be self-documenting.

castles-1.1.tar.gz (114.8 kB)

Full source code for the game. While it's theoretically possible to compile the game under Windows, it will almost certainly be very hard.