Assembly Language and Puzzle Games: A Conversation with Everett Kaser
460:00 - Introduction
1:25 - How to Play Sherlock
3:38 - Where to Find the Games
3:59 - Interview begins
4:55 - How did you start making games?
9:15 - Assembly language and the HP-85
10:28 - Is this your day job?
13:22 - The games are running on a custom-written virtual machine!
15:34 - I did a lot of programming in assembly language.
18:10 - Porting a C compiler at his custom assembly language and VM.
19:42 - Was your virtual machine modeled on the HP-85/Capricorn?
21:54 - A brief history of HP calculators and the HP-85.
26:06 - The Capricorn had HOW MANY registers? WAT.
28:45 - Programming the Game of Life; writing an assembler for the HP-85.
35:42 - Shout-out to the Floppy Days podcast.
38:39 - What are the people in Sherlock named?
43:29 - How do you generate only puzzles that are solvable?
50:10 - Why do some people dislike the "What if?" mechanics in some of your games?
52:27 - The Honeycomb Hotel game as part of the classroom.
54:30 - Do you have a favorite game among your works?
59:51- The music of the games
1:01:04 - Thank you
I always knew Everett Kaser made some of the best puzzle games available for computers. What I didn't know was that he was instrumental in the development of software for the ill-fated HP-85 series computers. I also didn't know that each of his puzzle games is actually a mini-VM that runs his games in an interpreter. There's a lot to dig into here, so let's have a conversation with Everett Kaser.