February 2025, after resurrecting the Commodore 64 version of ChipWits, I turned my attention to the game’s original platform: the 1984 Macintosh 128K. ChipWits debuted on the Mac in 1984, sporting a black-and-white GUI and 400 KB disks, and was later ported to colorful 8-bit systems in 1985. Rebuilding the Mac version presented a whole new set of challenges – from resource forks and archaic disk formats to […]
In September 2023, the ChipWits team discovered a stack of Commodore 64 disks containing the original FORTH source code for ChipWits, a game first released on the C64 in 1985. In their ChipWits Blog Post, you can read more about this discovery. About a year later, I came across a discussion on Slashdot, which inspired
The ChipWits team has been in major Nostalgia mode for the past month or two while we extract data from some old 5.25″ and 3.5″ disks containing the original Forth code for ChipWits. Thanks again to our many fans, including this one who had his own copy of the source code, our efforts are beginning
The last two weeks have been a flurry of archaeology! First, a fan found a Mac Diskette With the 1984 ChipWits Source Code. While we were researching and discussing how to read old Mac-formatted disks, Doug Sharp, the original creator of ChipWits, recalled where he was keeping the original Commodore 64 disks with all of
On August 20th, we received an email from a fan of the original game. He saw our video Interview by @TeaLeavesProgramming about our reboot of the game, and he recalled that he had contacted Doug about ChipWits in the 80s. At that time, our fan asked Doug if he could have a copy of the
ChipWits is both a serious and a light-hearted game. Serious about teaching computer science. Light-hearted because our ChipWits wear roller skates and drink COFFEE and perform robot music. We included Carusoid (a musical robot) in the original Commodore 64 version of ChipWits in 1984. A ChipWit is not a mech firing mega-lasers at enemy mechs.
Will you be able to beat the world’s top ChipWit programmers? One of the features we’re most excited about in the new reboot of ChipWits is making it a leaderboard game. Here’s a preview of the leaderboard in our latest development build: The leaderboard is enabled on some missions, and lets you compare your solution
Back in olden times when programmers had to finger-paint our 1s and 0s on cave walls, players actually wrote snail mail letters to publishers. I’m glad I kept this one. It’s a combination of a letter of complaint and a fan letter. Brainworks is the publisher of the Apple II and Mac versions of ChipWits.
IBOL (ICON BASED OBJECT-ORIENTED LANGUAGE) is the part of ChipWits I’m most proud of. Mike Johnston and I did a good job of creating a useful, fun language that is easy to learn and use. We cut the number of OPs (operators) and ARGs (arguments) to the minimum while still making a real programming language.
One of the challenges of designing ChipWits was to come up with a simple but fun world for the bots to play in. When Mike Johnston and I started to shape our vision of the game we spent a lot of time coming up with a list of THINGs for the ChipWits to eat, zap,
