DROID is a game written in 1984 by Robert Yazhari, Joshua Kors and Craig Fransen at Reichhold Chemicals. The game was inspired by RobotWar.
The aim of DROID is to write a program in D-code to control the movement, radar and weapon systems of a battle robot. Up to seven robots battle simultaneously to eliminate all opponents.
D-Code Overview
D-code is a stack based programming language that provides instructions to manipulate the stack, perform simple maths and transfer control. DROID has 24 general purpose user registers and 10 system registers:
| Register | Description |
|---|---|
| A - W, Z | General purpose user registers. |
| DAMAGE | Returns the current damage. Starts at 100. |
| RADAR | Angle of the radar, 0 to 3599. Returns the distance to anything discovered. |
| RANDOM | Returns a random number between 0 and the upper limit. |
| SHOT | Distance to aim the gun. Returns the amount of damage inflicted. |
| SPEEDX | Horizontal speed of the robot, -10000 to 10000. |
| SPEEDY | Vertical speed of the robot, -10000 to 10000. |
| TURRET | Angle of the gun, 0 to 3599. Returns the temperature of the gun. |
| WIDTH | Width of the radar beam. |
| X | Returns the current horizontal position. |
| Y | Returns the current vertical position. |
See the DROID User Manual for full details of D-code.
Simulator
The Droid Operating System is written in SPL for the HP 3000 series of computers.