Show HN: Tinytetris – 80 x 23 Terminal Tetris (opens in new tab)

(github.com)

147 pointstaylorconor6y ago52 comments

52 comments

Friendly reminder: Tetris is one of the most valuable, and vigorously defended, game IPs in the world. Such aspects of the game as the dimensions of the playfield and the shapes of the tetrominoes are protected by copyrights and trademarks belonging to Tetris Holdings LLC -- and Tetris Holdings is Oracle-tier litigious. Yes, this has stood up in court. Hope you like unfriendly C&Ds from powerful attorneys.

cdubzzz6y ago

Have they ever actually ended up in court? I was on the receiving end of one of these letters many years back for a clone I was involved with, but we just kept distributing it for a long time and they just sent basically the same letter a few years later. The primary developer eventually stopped the project only because he moved on to other things.

I feel like back then we didn’t find any cases backing up TTC’s claims, but I haven’t kept up over the years.

bitwize6y ago

Look up Tetris Holdings, LLC v. Xio Interactive, Inc. The court found 100% in favor of Tetris Holdings, in particular noting the shape of the tetrominoes, the way the tetrominoes spun and fell, and the dimensions of the game board as protectable elements under U.S. copyright law. Since this ruling was handed down, Tetris has applied for and received U.S. trademarks on the tetromino pieces.

The upshot of this is that it is illegal to develop a clone of Tetris. It doesn't matter whether you call it Tetris or not, or whether you use "ripped" or copied assets or not -- the very fact that you have copied Tetris means you are infringing. It may be illegal to develop a video game that uses tetrominoes at all since the tetromino pieces are protected trademarks of The Tetris Company.

2 more replies

legohead6y ago

There used to be a playable Tetris in the favicon, which I found from HN[1], but it looks like the website[2] is dead now :(

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3873623

[2] http://favris.info/

themodelplumber6y ago

There was also a suite of Windows games I played back in ~2003 that occupied maybe a 32x64 window each, and one of them was mini Tetris. As I recall, the developer was Israeli. Anyway it was awesome for playing casually in stealth mode; there were no window decorations and the games were well made. I think one of the other games was pool. I haven't been able to find them since.

slazaro6y ago

Have you tried asking in the subreddit "tip of my tongue" [0]? I have been amazed at what they can figure out about obscure stuff with very abstract clues.

[0] https://www.reddit.com/r/tipofmytongue/

1 more reply

dannyw6y ago

Probably because of how vocal Tetris's IP lawyers are.

colejohnson666y ago

From what I understand (correct me if I’m wrong), they don’t care if you make a Tetris game, just don’t have the name “Tetris” in your title.

amasad6y ago

Cool! I made a demo playable in the browser: https://repl.it/@amasad/tinytetris

Or run it directly here: https://tinytetris.amasad.repl.run/

OrgNet6y ago

> Or run it directly here: https://tinytetris.amasad.repl.run/

I needed to allow requests to five 3rd party domains for this tiny Tetris to load (uMatrix)

amasad6y ago

Absolute madness.

1 more reply

yihsiu6y ago

Is it just me? I can't make any operations, and tetrominoes did not drop from center (horizontally), but kind of from random position

Arkanosis6y ago

Try wasd instead of arrows.

And yes, the starting position of new pieces looks random.

twic6y ago

I didn't think i'd ever read a Tetris implementation more incomprehensible than sedtris [1], but here we are.

[1] https://github.com/uuner/sedtris

ksaj6y ago

Here it is in a rather ambitious toy assembler language created specifically to play tetris using Conway's Game of Life rules. Trying to grok it will melt your brain on multiple levels.

http://play.starmaninnovations.com/qftasm/#jllHdnBGSP

alpn6y ago

To quickly build and run from your terminal:

   git clone https://github.com/taylorconor/tinytetris && cd tinytetris
   gcc tinytetris.cpp -lcurses -o tetris && ./tetris

coolreader186y ago

Or straight from curl:

    curl https://raw.githubusercontent.com/taylorconor/tinytetris/master/tinytetris.cpp | gcc -x c++ - -lcurses -o tinytetris

kd5bjo6y ago

Very nice; writing minified code is a challenge I've never been particularly good at.

As it happens, though, I had a university assignment due today to write a WebGL falling-triomino game:

  Start game: space
  Rotate: a/z s/x d/c
  Move: arrows
  Drop: space

http://2-71828.com/T%C3%B6lvugraf%C3%ADk/Verkefni03/tris.htm...

baddox6y ago

You could probably go even smaller by using higher resolution characters, like Braille, but without the per-block colors.

mkl6y ago

One time in high school I made a Tetris clone (in one lunch hour!) with single pixels as the squares, and used the VGA video memory itself as the data structure for the current board state. It was in 320x200 resolution, so the pixels were pretty big (the game area itself was only a small rectangle of them). My version didn't detect when the pieces reached the top or keep score or anything, just the basic playable mechanics.

classichasclass6y ago

With ncurses it runs out of the box on my POWER6 AIX machine, so A for portability. I'd give you an A+ if I had xlc installed locally, but I cheated a little and used gcc. (For ncurses, I used the perzl pre-built library.)

abhinai6y ago

Fascinating! Are there any easy to follow tutorial on how to manipulate pixel blocks (I wonder what the right term is) inside terminals?

the_pwner2246y ago

If you're referring to the game pieces, the creater probably just used these Unicode characters: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Block_Elements

JdeBP6y ago

As you can see from the program and screenshot right in front of you, xe did not.

It's one of only two printw()s in the code, and the screenshot shows the result quite clearly.

1 more reply

AceJohnny26y ago

https://www.linuxjournal.com/content/getting-started-ncurses

blondin6y ago

amazing op! tetris is one of those game on my need to implement list and never actually finished an implementation :)

zrobotics6y ago

Don't let yourself get hung up on doing anything fancy, it's just fun to do. Seriously, just implementing tetris in processing is a fun way to spend an hour, and a great way to remind yourself of why programming is fun. It doesn't involve anything crazy as far as algorithms, but is a fun challenge to do. It's definitely worth it to implement a version, it is just fun to do.

taylorconorOP6y ago

+1! And there are plenty of helpful tutorials around if you get a bit stuck!

colejohnson666y ago

I found this a while back: http://javilop.com/gamedev/tetris-tutorial-in-c-platform-ind... It’s Tetris in C++, so it should be easy to adapt it to a C like language (or other if you can follow the logic)

svnpenn6y ago

It's a quine

benj1116y ago

Is it? I see no mechanism for outputting anything other that the game board.

And theres no mention on the site.

taylorconorOP6y ago

It's not a quine :)

1 more reply

mhiming6y ago

Here’s a 509 byte JavaScript Tetris https://github.com/veu/mini-tetris

sys_647386y ago

On my Mac I can just type:

'emacs -f tetris'

zapzupnz6y ago

Yes, but that's rather besides the point. It's not the fact that it's Tetris in a terminal; it's also the fact that it's minified code. Look at the GIF on the Github page; that's the code of the game.

j / k navigate · click thread line to collapse

52 comments

bitwize6y ago

cdubzzz6y ago

I feel like back then we didn’t find any cases backing up TTC’s claims, but I haven’t kept up over the years.

bitwize6y ago

2 more replies

legohead6y ago

There used to be a playable Tetris in the favicon, which I found from HN[1], but it looks like the website[2] is dead now :(

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3873623

[2] http://favris.info/

themodelplumber6y ago

slazaro6y ago

Have you tried asking in the subreddit "tip of my tongue" [0]? I have been amazed at what they can figure out about obscure stuff with very abstract clues.

[0] https://www.reddit.com/r/tipofmytongue/

1 more reply

dannyw6y ago

Probably because of how vocal Tetris's IP lawyers are.

colejohnson666y ago

From what I understand (correct me if I’m wrong), they don’t care if you make a Tetris game, just don’t have the name “Tetris” in your title.

amasad6y ago

Cool! I made a demo playable in the browser: https://repl.it/@amasad/tinytetris

Or run it directly here: https://tinytetris.amasad.repl.run/

OrgNet6y ago

> Or run it directly here: https://tinytetris.amasad.repl.run/

I needed to allow requests to five 3rd party domains for this tiny Tetris to load (uMatrix)

amasad6y ago

Absolute madness.

1 more reply

yihsiu6y ago

Is it just me? I can't make any operations, and tetrominoes did not drop from center (horizontally), but kind of from random position

Arkanosis6y ago

Try wasd instead of arrows.

And yes, the starting position of new pieces looks random.

twic6y ago

I didn't think i'd ever read a Tetris implementation more incomprehensible than sedtris [1], but here we are.

[1] https://github.com/uuner/sedtris

ksaj6y ago

Here it is in a rather ambitious toy assembler language created specifically to play tetris using Conway's Game of Life rules. Trying to grok it will melt your brain on multiple levels.

http://play.starmaninnovations.com/qftasm/#jllHdnBGSP

alpn6y ago

To quickly build and run from your terminal:

   git clone https://github.com/taylorconor/tinytetris && cd tinytetris
   gcc tinytetris.cpp -lcurses -o tetris && ./tetris

coolreader186y ago

Or straight from curl:

    curl https://raw.githubusercontent.com/taylorconor/tinytetris/master/tinytetris.cpp | gcc -x c++ - -lcurses -o tinytetris

kd5bjo6y ago

Very nice; writing minified code is a challenge I've never been particularly good at.

As it happens, though, I had a university assignment due today to write a WebGL falling-triomino game:

  Start game: space
  Rotate: a/z s/x d/c
  Move: arrows
  Drop: space

http://2-71828.com/T%C3%B6lvugraf%C3%ADk/Verkefni03/tris.htm...

baddox6y ago

You could probably go even smaller by using higher resolution characters, like Braille, but without the per-block colors.

mkl6y ago

classichasclass6y ago

abhinai6y ago

Fascinating! Are there any easy to follow tutorial on how to manipulate pixel blocks (I wonder what the right term is) inside terminals?

the_pwner2246y ago

If you're referring to the game pieces, the creater probably just used these Unicode characters: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Block_Elements

JdeBP6y ago

As you can see from the program and screenshot right in front of you, xe did not.

It's one of only two printw()s in the code, and the screenshot shows the result quite clearly.

1 more reply

AceJohnny26y ago

https://www.linuxjournal.com/content/getting-started-ncurses

blondin6y ago

amazing op! tetris is one of those game on my need to implement list and never actually finished an implementation :)

zrobotics6y ago

taylorconorOP6y ago

+1! And there are plenty of helpful tutorials around if you get a bit stuck!

colejohnson666y ago

svnpenn6y ago

It's a quine

benj1116y ago

Is it? I see no mechanism for outputting anything other that the game board.

And theres no mention on the site.

taylorconorOP6y ago

It's not a quine :)

1 more reply

mhiming6y ago

Here’s a 509 byte JavaScript Tetris https://github.com/veu/mini-tetris

sys_647386y ago

On my Mac I can just type:

'emacs -f tetris'

zapzupnz6y ago

j / k navigate · click thread line to collapse