Rover

In Safe Cracker the machine waited for you to think. Here it answers you as you move. Rover puts a craft on screen that you drive with the joystick, through a maze of walls, collecting pickups for points. The trick at its heart is control: for the first time in the volume, the machine responds in real time — the rover goes where you push, the instant you push.

This is the volume’s first real-time game. You’ll read the joystick on control port 2 with PEEK(56320) every pass of a loop, move the rover by the erase-move-draw technique, and — the heart of it — detect collisions by looking ahead: PEEK the cell the rover is about to enter and decide what happens before it gets there. Wall, pickup, or open space, read from the screen itself.

What you’ll build:

• A rover placed on screen as two position variables and two POKEs
• Joystick control: PEEK(56320), the direction bits, and erase-move-draw
• Walls drawn into the screen that stop the rover dead
• Pickups that score when collected, and a score on a status row
• A board you can clear — collect them all for an “ALL CLEAR” finish
• A title screen and a fire-to-start, turning the toy into a game

6 units. About 7–10 hours. This follows Safe Cracker and builds on Meet C64 BASIC.