There is a classic Commodore one-liner program that prints a maze. I have discussed it on this site several times in the past:

10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1));GOTO 10

I converted it to use CoCo ASCII “/” and “\” characters:

10 PRINT CHR$(47+(RND(2)-1)*45); : GOTO 10

I have since noticed that the 10 PRINT book even has a version for the CoCo in it:

https://10print.org/10_PRINT_121114.pdf page 55

Recently, Jim Gerrie posted a video of a new one-liner MC-10 version of the maze that truly fit on one 32-column line of the MC-10:

His approach of using MID$() looked much simpler than the CHR$ version of the Commodore original. I am pretty sure my VIC-20 had MID$ so surely the C64 had it as well. Why wasn’t it used? Perhaps this was an example of code obfuscation. “Type in this mysterious code and see what you get!”

Indeed, in a quick test, using MID$() is smaller and faster:

0 PRINTMID$("/\",RND(2));:GOTO

0 PRINTCHR$(47+(RND(2)-1)*45);:GOTO

Now, doing the MC-10 version with CHR$() would be longer on the CoCo since we can’t type those characters like the MC-10 allows. We’d have to use CHR$(140)+CHR$(138) embedded in the MID$ to make that work (and be much slower since it would parse those numbers for every byte of the maze it prints). But…

0 PRINTMID$(CHR$(140)+CHR$(138),RND(2));:GOTO

…does work.

To make it faster, we’d need two lines and a string:

0 A$=CHR$(140)+CHR$(138)
1 PRINTMID$(A$,RND(2));:GOTO1

Even with that, the GOTO is slower than the MC-10 version since it has to parse a number, and then has to skip a line each time. You could get around that by doing it like this, and starting it with “RUN 1”:

0 PRINTMID$(A$,RND(2));:GOTO
1 A$=CHR$(140)+CHR$(138):GOTO

How would you do it? Let me know in the comments.

Until next time…