Duck Pong

Screen Capture of Actual Duck Pong Session

Coming Soon! Movie File of Duck Pong Running On A Stall Protection Computer

Ok, I can capture the video to a file now. Now I just have to get together enough money to buy the disk space at Visi.

What Is Duck Pong and Why Would I Want to Have It?

Duck Pong was invented by Keith* and I after hours (well, mostly after hours) at Rosemount Aerospace Inc. where we both worked at the time. It was designed to be a really stupid computer game. The idea is that it's a cross between the two most popular video game styles of the late 1970's/early 1980's. Back then you had Pong style games where a ball bounced around inside of some barriers and you had to move a paddle to keep it from leaving the play area. Sometimes they called the ball a football or puck or whatever, it didn't really matter - they all looked the same and were square. You also had Shooting games back then where you used the controller to move around some kind of gun and you shot at targets floating by on the oppisite end of the screen.

Look at the screen above and you can see that Duck Pong combines the two ideas wonderfully.

"Big Deal!" you say. "So you figured out how to program algorithms they used 20 years ago, and you combined them in a way stupider than anybody ever thought of combining them before! Boy! That's Impressive! I'll start downloading right now so I can play right away."

What's cool about Duck Pong is it's designed to run on Any computing platform. I mean any platform: toasters, answering machines, airplane black boxes, pacemaker programmers, anything you can think of that you can program and that has sufficient bandwidth for I/O. Sufficient bandwidth seems to be about a 38400 baud serial connection.

Duck Pong works by sending ANSI escape sequences to a display device. This has been done by many programs in the past, however VT100 escape sequences seem more popular than ANSI escape sequences. ~~It shouldn't be too hard to convert Duck Pong if you want to.~~ I take that back. It seems that VT100s can't display the graphics characters I need. SI and SO aren't enough, you'd have to load another character set or something.

Duck Pong proper is written in ANSI C with no library dependancies. You have to provide functions outstr(), get_ypadl(), new_ball(), tell_live_ducks(), and tell_nballs() for the pong module to call; and you have to provide an executive to call pong_init(), then pong_exec() once every 25 mS or so until the game is over, then call pong_exit(). I think you get the basic idea.

So, download the Duck Pong Developer Kit now (180K). It includes a PC executable that demonstrates the game, and it includes all the source code for the game. (To use the PC demo you need device=c:\windows\command\ansi.sys in your config.sys file). You can download an ANSI terminal emulator to use with Duck Pong AnsiTerm (173K). (AnsiTerm also includes source code).

*(Keith's last name not used because I don't yet have permission to use it in association with Duck Pong).

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