Wanderer

About

Boulder Dash is a 1984 maze puzzle game by First Star Software, created by Peter Liepa and Chris Gray, in which the player controls Rockford tunneling through dirt to collect diamonds while avoiding falling boulders. Wanderer is a text-based, curses-driven clone of Boulder Dash for the terminal, with a built-in screen editor for creating new levels, password-protected level jumping for 'wizards,' and a per-username high-score table. It requires the curses and termcap libraries to build and run.

How it differs from the original

As a text-mode clone, Wanderer renders Boulder Dash's gameplay using curses-based terminal graphics rather than the original's graphical presentation.

Getting started

After building with a C compiler (requiring the curses and termcap libraries) and configuring file paths in the source, the game is launched from the command line; a built-in screen editor lets you create and test new levels, and there's a hidden 'wizard' password for jumping directly to any screen.

History

Wanderer was written by Steven Shipway on a Sun 3/160 machine at Warwick University, with an MS-DOS port and save-game routines contributed by Greg Margo.

Known issues & limitations

• platform: Requires ncurses library; has issues with environment variable retrieval under 64-bit GCC that can cause segfaults.

Media

Additional notes

Quirk

On 64-bit GCC builds, a bug in environment-variable retrieval can cause segfaults when writing the high-score table or exit message.