#Linux

Termzogs is the second CLI game I’ve made. Yet again, it is based on a classic ZX81 game. This time inspired by the superb game Mazogs by Don Priestley. For this game, I decided to give AI Vibe Coding a try. I was curious to find out two things. First, I wanted to see if it would make coding easier and faster (I was pretty sure it would manage that much). The second reason was to see if programming would still be enjoyable and rewarding, or if AI would take all the pleasure and satisfaction out of writing code.

One of the very first games I ever played on a home computer was a maze game called Labyrinth on the Sinclair ZX81. So when I wanted to learn Golang and delve a little deeper into terminal cli development, I decided to start with a simple maze game that could be run in a shell on the Linux command line. As you can see from the screenshot, the graphics could, at best, be describes as very basic. But as a learning project, I’m quite pleased with the result.

As you might expect, the software that accompanied my Everio HDD camcorder when I bought it was not compatible with Linux. Just as well we don’t actually need any special software to download recordings onto your favourite OS (yes I do mean Linux!) Plug everything in, USB and the power adapter then switch the camera into PLAY mode. At this point you should be presented with the usual KDE or GNOME window and be able to view/copy the files in the same way as you would a USB memory stick. However, there are a couple of drawbacks with this. First, just dragging the files will create a copy on your PC with timestamps of when you copied the videos, not actually filmed them. Second, the video files on your camcorder end in .mod and not .mpg which would be preferable for compatible playback. So we’ll be using the command line to copy recording and rename them. There’s not much to it really…