Buck Hunt

This game is a graphical edition of Mugwump, a classic BASIC game featured in this stream. The goal is to find 4 buckos within 10 guesses, each guess leaking the distance from that guess to each bucko.

The gimmick here is that this is a x86 boot sector game, i.e., it can be booted directly from a (floppy) disk and fits in a single 512-byte sector. It is, admittedly, not much of a game; the challenge was to make it fit in 512 bytes with as much functionality as possible.

How to Build

The game can be assembled using NASM. I also provide the pre-built buckhunt and buckhunt.com, which can be run using QEMU and DOSBox respectively.

To build a bootsector that can be run with QEMU (or natively), use the command

nasm -f bin buckhunt.asm -o buckhunt

To build a bootsector that can be run with DOSBox, use the command

nasm -f bin -DDOSBOX buckhunt.asm -o buckhunt.com

How to Play

Buck Hunt can be run in DOSBox as a regular .com DOS binary,

dosbox buckhunt.com

or with QEMU as follows:

qemu-system-x86_64 -drive format=raw,file=buckhunt

The game itself is simple:

• Press 'q' to quit at any point.
• Use the arrow keys to move the bucko around the map.
• To try and make a guess, press Enter.
• If all 4 buckos were found, you won! Press any key to start a new game.
• If no bucko was not found at your guess, the (Euclidean) distance of the buckos to that guess will be displayed.
• You have 10 guesses. If you exhaust the guesses, you lose the game. Press any key to start anew.

Have fun!