Twenty-five years!

It has been twenty-five years since I last released a prod at a demoparty, according to Demozoo (not that I have release many...). But this year, finally, I submitted a small minesweeper game at the Lovebyte 2025 demoparty. Sadly, there was no nanogame competition this year and games were only showcased, but judging from the reactions in the chat people seemed to like it, which is absolutely wonderful!

What is it?

It is a game of minesweeper, for DOS. It runs in Dosbox and in Dosbox-X, it also runs on my 486 under MS-DOS 6.22 and FreeDOS 1.3, and it even runs in a DOS window under Win98 on my K6-III.

It presents as a .COM executable file, and the entire game is 256 bytes.

What does it features?

It runs in VGA graphics mode 13h so that the mouse pointer can be an actual arrow. Also, this gives the opportunity to use a nicer color palette.

The digits indicating the amount of nearby mines are colored based on their value, and right-click can be used to flag a cell.

Full eight-way flood reveal is implemented to automatically reveal entire zones where adjacent cells have zero nearby mine.

Try it by yourself right here:

Limitations

Of course there are limitations. What did you expect, this is a 256 bytes game!

• The map generation is not delayed, so you might end up dying on your very first click.
• There is no tri-state flagging, where you could put a question mark on a cell.
• No middle-click either that would allow to reveal all neighbours of a cell that has all its nearby mines already flagged.
• Map size is fixed. You can change the amount of mines, but this is done by editing the value in source code and recompiling.
• The only way to exit the game is to win or lose it. And to know if you won or if you lost, when you get back to the DOS prompt, you need to check the last cell you clicked. If it shows a mine, then you lost ;-)
• The video mode is not restored on exit, but on the other hand this leaves the finished game on screen so you can tell if you won or not.
• The presence of the mouse driver is not checked. I must admit I haven't tested that and I don't know how you'd exit the game without a working mouse. Apologies if that gets you stuck when trying to play on a real computer.
• When you lose a game, there's no visual clue of wrongly placed flags and unflagged mines.
• There is no display of elapsed time or the number of mines left.

Despite these, I find the game totally playable, but I might be biased.

Download and externl links

You can download the game here. Source code is included, of course, and you can do whatever you want with it.

Entry is now created on Pouët.net and the page on Demozoo is up, though still a bit empty.