This is the disassembled and commented source code for the 1983 Commodore 64 game Matrix by Jeff Minter. It is part of the llamasource project.
A version of the game you can play in your browser can be found at https://matrix.xyz.
Minter wrote in his design notes for the game:
Matrix: The last of the Grid games, transferred over to the '64 in
an intense 3-day hack session just before my holiday in Portugal.
The graphics look a bit thin and weedy if you've been used to the
nice fat Vic display, but the action is very fast. Despite its
Centipede roots, I still look on the Grid series as quite a nice
bit of blasting. The XY cannon makes them just sufficiently different
to be a decent blast. I never did get through all 20 levels without
resorting to cheating (the cheat mode is accessed by holding down
Commodore, Shift, CTRL and a letter key, and is left over from when
I was testing the levels), best I managed legitimately was to reach
Level 17.
The game contains a cheatcode for skipping levels. It's slightly complicated
and was added by Minter himself to assist testing. If you hold down Ctrl
,
Shift
, and Tab
and press any other key the game will clear the level, give
you a bonus and an extra life. You can use this sequence to skip ahead as many
levels as you like!
To compile and run it do:
$ make
The compiled game is written to the bin
folder.
To just compile the game and get a binary (matrix.prg
) do:
$ make matrix