Bot to play MazeWare

[PeterQuinn925]

Hi, I'm in the process of writing a bot to play mazewar. We're setting up an exhibit at a video game museum on the history of first person shooter games and we want to show Mazewar. We're going to use the PiDP-10 emulator to do so. The problem that I see is that it will mighty boring to play Mazewar with only one player. My thought is that it will be at least a little more interesting if there is a bot or three wandering the maze to shoot at.
If someone has already written one, I'd be happy to try to use it. I've been unable to find one for the ITS version of the game.

I've made quite a number of false starts thinking that the Imlac terminal was mostly a dumb terminal that only showed the graphics that the PDP-10 generated. I've since corrected that and now understand that the Imlac does a lot of the heavy lifting and the PDP-10 coordinates between players.
Anyway, my first question is, upon starting Mazewar, quite a bit of binary data gets sent from the PDP-10 to the Imlac. My understanding is that this is the binary code of the game. Somewhere in this data is the maze. How can I find it and parse it? I could always assume the default maze, but it would be great to be able to get it on the fly.
Second question is how does the initial position get set. Reading the source, it appears to be random, but in practice it's not very random. I could hardcode the starting position by doing some experiments, but, I'd rather do it right. Does the Imlac tell the PDP-10 where the bot is starting? Or does the PDP-10 tell the Imlac? What needs to go over the wire in either direction?

[larsbrinkhoff]

This sounds like a very interesting project. Are you aware Maze already have "robot" players? It's just that they are a bit too good, so instead of being a boring game it's an impossible game.

For the maze data, check the Imlac source code. See the label "MAZE". It's at location 10020 in Imlac memory.

I don't know about the initial position. You will probably have to read the PDP-10 and Imlac code to figure out this kind of thing. Both machines have reasonable instruction sets, so they are not overly difficult to learn.