A downloadable game

Black Box is a game where you are given a box with some atoms inside, and you need to determine the positions of the atoms by sending particles into box and observing where they exit.

Black Box originally appeared in the August 1977 issue of Games and Puzzles.

A computerized version in BASIC was included in More Basic Computer Games (ISBN 0-89480-137-6).

This version is a port to MakerLisp for the Lisp Game Jam 2019.

Download

Download
blackbox.tar.gz 8 kB

Install instructions

If you want to play the game, you have three options:

  • If you have a MakerLisp Machine you can run the game on the actual hardware.
  • If you don't have the hardware, but are running Linux, you can run the game on the Linux port of MakerLisp.
  • If you just want to play without installing anything, you can play over telnet.

Playing Over Telnet

If you want to play without installing anything, you can telnet jam.stevelosh.com and select Black Box from the menu.

Note: the game will output UTF-8 bytes, so make sure your terminal is set to UTF-8 before playing if you want it to look right.

Playing On Linux

You can run the game on Linux:

  1. Download MakerLisp from http://makerlisp.com and extract it somewhere.
  2. cd path/to/makerlisp/src/lisp/linux && make
  3. Download blackbox.tar.gz and extract it to path/to/makerlisp/src/uSDimage/blackbox/
  4. Start MakerLisp: path/to/makerlisp/src/lisp/linux/lisp
  5. Add Black Box to your path: (setq *PATH* (cats *PATH* ':/blackbox))
  6. Run the game: (blackbox)

Playing On Hardware

If you have a MakerLisp Machine you can play on the hardware:

  1. Download blackbox.tar.gz and extract it to /blackbox on your SD card.
  2. Add /blackbox to your *PATH*
  3. Run (blackbox) at the MakerLisp REPL.

The initial loading will be slow as everything gets JIT compiled. Things will
get faster as you play.

You need to be running the latest version of the MakerLisp ROM — the game requires some of the recently-added features to run correctly.

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