Wednesday 2 February 2011

Celebrating 30 Years of Color Robot Battle

Color Robot Battle
Color Robot Battle is one of the earliest commercial programming games, published 30 years ago for the TRS-80 Color Computer by The Image Producers.

The game is played by writing programs to control a robot's movement, sensors and weapons. Programs are written in a hybrid of the BASIC / Logo programming languages. Two robots enter an arena with the survivor being declared the winner.

I asked the designer and programmer of Color Robot Battle what inspired the game:

“Well, the Apple II program did along with the feeling I could do it better. All of these were initially inspired by Core Wars, I believe. I did want to make the language complete enough to have quite a bit of control and flexibility over the robots.”
-- Glenn Sogge

“The robot controlling programming language was based on BASIC. Prior to working on CRB, I'd written a simple BASIC interpreter for the PDP-11, so it was a natural choice.”
-- Del Ogren


Color Robot Battle is a fantastic example of compact code. The game, compiler and full screen editor are all written in 6809 assembly language and somehow manage to fit on a 4K ROM.

Although the language of CRB only takes a few minutes to learn, a whole range of strategies are possible. There are four types of command available:

  • movement: followed by a number. Movement commands are F(orwards), B(ackwards), L(eft), R(ight), H(alt), T(urn), D(irection).
  • conditional: detect what the robot is facing. =(true) or #(false) followed by R(obot), W(all), M(issile), L(aser), S(omething - any direction), ?(random).
  • flow control: C(all) or G(oto) a label. Labels are defined at the beginning of a line and terminated by a >.
  • attack: XL to fire the laser or XM to fire a missile.

The program starts at the label START>. Multiple commands on one line are separated by a colon :. If a condition fails the rest of the line is skipped.

Here's a simple example that manages to win a few battles:

*SIGMA               ; robot name
START>               ; start here
F5                   ; move forward 5
=W:T1                ; if facing a wall, turn 45°                
=?:T1                ; randomly turn 45°
=R:XL                ; if facing a robot, fire laser
GSTART               ; repeat from start

Thanks to the simplicity of the language, CRB makes the perfect introduction to programming games. So, does anyone fancy a tournament? ;-)


Color Robot Battle's editor

7 comments:

  1. This is similar to Robocode.

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  2. And this is a modern day version http://www.cs.technion.ac.il/~nhershko/Swarm/Swarm.html

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  3. I don't understand 2 rules. 1. What's the difference between a laser and a missile? 2.How exactly is random defined?

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  4. anonymous: a missile take more energy to fire than a laser and also does more damage. In the screenshot the missile is white, the laser is red.

    Random is either =? or #? and has a 50/50 chance of skipping the rest of the line.

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  5. Just found your blog and I like it. This takes me back to the 80's. It's like a museum. Thanks for posting all this and I'll be back.

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  6. Probably uncouth to ask this, but does anyone know of a .ROM image for Robot Battle online? My Coco is long gone and this game brings back fond memories of my first programming experiences. Would be neat to try again.

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  7. Here's a link describing my Basic language variation for the TRS-80 MC-10:
    http://jimgerrie.blogspot.ca/2013/01/battle-bots-rules-and-version-notes.html#!/2013/01/battle-bots-rules-and-version-notes.html

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