{"id":453,"date":"2013-06-29T10:26:45","date_gmt":"2020-02-18T06:53:26","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/redfrontdoor.org\/blg2\/?p=453"},"modified":"2020-02-18T16:51:56","modified_gmt":"2020-02-18T16:51:56","slug":"post-447","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/redfrontdoor.org\/blog\/?p=453","title":{"rendered":"Cobra: a Dragon 32 game from my past"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>About thirty years ago, my dad and I wrote a game for our Dragon 32 home computer.  It was originally a pen and paper game for two players; in our version you played against the computer.  I have tried to recreate the experience on the web.  It needed a bit more room than this blog format allows, so it has its own page:<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: center\"><a href=\"\/cobra\/cobra.html\"><img decoding=\"async\" alt=\"\" src=\"\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/06\/game-in-progress.png\"><\/a><\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: center\"><a href=\"\/cobra\/cobra.html\">Cobra: a Dragon 32 game from my past<\/a><\/p>\n<p>Looking back now, I realise how much time Dad put in to this project, and how much effort my parents put into encouraging my interests in general.  I&#8217;m very grateful to them.<\/p>\n<h2>Epilogue<\/h2>\n<p>Thanks to Nick Gray, I now know that this game is a variant of the <strong>Black path game<\/strong>, after its inventor Larry Black.  The original game starts with an empty board, and there is a <a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Black_Path_Game#Strategy\">winning strategy<\/a> for the first player.  The pre-filled top-left square would turn this into a winning strategy for the second player.  However, the losing lower-right square renders that strategy ineffective.  There might be a different winning strategy of course.<\/p>\n<p>Some time after Dad and I had written our version, <a href=\"\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/07\/DragonUser-Feb-1985-pp-46-47.pdf\">a different version appeared in Dragon User<\/a>, where the lower-right square <strong>won<\/strong> for the player steering the snake into it.  I think that under those rules, the second player can always win.<\/p>\n<p>Thanks are also due to the <a href=\"http:\/\/www.6809.org.uk\/dragon\/xroar.shtml\">XRoar<\/a> project for their emulator, which I used to check the behaviour of the original Basic program scraped off cassette.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>About thirty years ago, my dad and I wrote a game for our Dragon 32 home computer. It was originally a pen and paper game for two players; in our version you played against the computer. I have tried to recreate the experience on the web. It needed a bit more room than this blog format allows, so it has its own page: Cobra: a Dragon 32 game from my past Looking back now, I realise how much time Dad put in to this project, and how much effort my parents put into encouraging my interests in general. I&#8217;m very grateful to them. Epilogue Thanks to Nick Gray, I now know that this game is a variant of the Black<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-453","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","comments-off"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/redfrontdoor.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/453","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/redfrontdoor.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/redfrontdoor.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/redfrontdoor.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/redfrontdoor.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=453"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/redfrontdoor.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/453\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2184,"href":"https:\/\/redfrontdoor.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/453\/revisions\/2184"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/redfrontdoor.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=453"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/redfrontdoor.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=453"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/redfrontdoor.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=453"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}