Believe it or not, it’s a name. And it’s the name of a game we programmed with some friends in our first year at university, in Algorithms and Data Structures.

It’s a classic: we control a worm, and we have to “eat” what appears on the screen…

… and in this case, what you have to eat are chips. Like all games of this type, if we only had to eat chips it would be boring, so you also have to avoid obstacles.

There are 4 difficulty levels (Very difficult is very fun), and when you lose you have the possibility to see a replay of the match. In the config.txt file you can change the position of the chips (these appear one at a time), and also the position of the obstacles.

You can run it perfectly on GNU/Linux with the DosBox emulator:

1. First download the source code from here.

2. Decompress it in some directory: tar -xjf eufruncio-1.0.1.tar.bz2

3. Two directories will be created: eufruncio-recursivo and eufruncio-no_recursivo. Honestly I don’t remember exactly what differences there are, but I do remember that one function changed (obviously, in one version it works recursively with something and in the other it doesn’t. Maybe that’s the only change). Both variants work without problems.

4. Turn on your speakers 😉

5. Run DosBox, and within the simulated DOS environment execute:

   1 2 3 4

   mount c /home/usuario c: cd path/a/directorio/bin/de/eufruncio tpf.exe

If you’re not planning to carry out all the previous steps, maybe I can convince you to try it with these screenshots (?):

Eufruncio is programmed in C, and it’s Free Software. So if you’re interested you can download it, try it, and if you have the desire and time, modify it. There are many things that could be changed, improved and added:

• The possibility for two players to play in the same match. In this case, you not only have to avoid obstacles, but also the body of the other player’s worm. I once tried this type of game with this feature with some friends… despite its simplicity, you don’t know how entertaining it is. Another possibility is to implement this, but networked, with several players at once.

• Something simple: record keeping, to know who is the best player, and who should dedicate themselves to something else.

• Something not so simple (and taking the first point a bit further): programming a server and clients.

• Improving the difficulty levels.

• Possibility to choose to play against bots (it would be option one, but against the computer). The interesting thing about this is programming their intelligence.

• Incorporating levels: so the user progresses through them. For this you could write files (like config.txt), with said levels (more obstacles, more chips, etc).

• Programming it with ncurses… or else make something graphical, with Gtk or Qt.

Some might ask why?… but maybe someone with the desire to start a simple project like this, or someone who is learning C, might be interested.

The authors of Eufruncio - The chip-eating little worm, are:

• Sebastián Galiano
• César Sandrigo
• and me.

Enjoy it.