PCRobots Official Web site

This page is very old, unsupported, and not very good, but due to popular request we've made it available as it is.

I want to know about any alternative PCRobots web pages which are good, and any leagues etc which are going on, so I can link to them from this site.

PCRobots Source code

The main thing which people want to see is the source for PCRobots, so here it is!

BE WARNED It isn't written in the most readable style around, and you MUST be a DOS guru before even attempting to understand 90% of it.

There is lots of complex stuff in it, like EXE file loaders, DOS memory allocation simulator, EMS memory handlers, interrupt interceptors, basic multitasking kernel (it's cooperative, not pre-emptive - I didn't want to risk re-entering DOS functions). It also includes some 8086 assembler programming.

Please, please do not judge my current programming ability on the style of the source code here! DEFINITELY do not attempt to learn programming by copying what I did

I have learned a lot since writing this in the early 90's, and it was in the relatively early days of the C++ programming language, so many features which are standard now were not standard then, and I was learning C++ at the time, so it's a strange mixture of C, C with classes and C++.

The software was also written pre-Windows, so there was no real OS to help out. So, for instance, the 'sound effects' were achieved by writing to hardware I/O ports on an Adlib sound card directly, etc.

Having said that, I learned a lot FROM writing this software - at that point, it was one of the most complex pieces of software I'd written, and one of the most fun.

Note I am NOT going to give any support for this code at all. If you want to modify it, then do as you will with it, but I simply cannot afford the time to do any work with it, or to tell you why changing this bit here or that thingummy there causes it to fall in a big heap.

If you modify it, you can distribute it as will, but:


The source code available here should compile with Borland C++ 3.1
Download the source here

Please don't make this source code downloadable from anywhere else! Link to this page if you want to.

If you want to email me about PCRobots, then email me at pcrobots@pscs.co.uk.
PCRobots mail to other addresses will just be ignored.
Mail to the above address should be replied to, but I can't guarantee to be any help, and it may take a few days to respond since PCRobots isn't a high priority for me at the moment.

I can almost guarantee I won't be any help at questions like "How do I create a robot in Basic/Pascal/Forth/Ada/Fortran/etc" as I don't know those languages.
I can try to help with writing robots in C/C++, but I probably won't be much help because:

  1. I was never much good at writing the actual robots...
  2. It was a long time ago (1994) when I last did anything with this software!
  3. I haven't got a DOS compiler to be able to test things on nowadays

I'm sorry if it sounds a bit as if I don't want to know, but I am actually very little help on the things that people usually want to know (ie how to write robots, or why there isn't a Windows 95 version), and I have little spare time to work on it nowadays. PCRobots was written whilst I was a student, so I had quite a bit of spare time. Now, I actually have to do paid work in order to eat, so spare time is a lot less abundant than it was.

I'm constantly surprised that people are still using a DOS program with (let's face it) pretty naff graphics. Because of that, I wanted to put together an "official" site, and hopefully draw together a few other of the much better web sites which are around.

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