Moon-buggy

By Jochen Voss, last updated October 12, 2014.

Moon-buggy is a simple character graphics game where you drive some kind of car across the moon's surface. Unfortunately there are dangerous craters there. Fortunately your car can jump over them!

The game has some resemblance of the classic arcade game moon-patrol which was released in 1982. A clone of this game was relased for the Commodore C64 in 1983. The present, ASCII art version of moon-buggy was written many years later by Jochen Voss.

Screen Shots

The moon-buggy title screen

  Moon-Buggy version 1.0, Copyright 2004 Jochen Voss <voss@seehuhn.de>
  Moon-Buggy comes with ABSOLUTELY NO WARRANTY; for details type 'w'.
  This is free software, and you are welcome to redistribute it
  under certain conditions; type 'c' for details.

               MM     MM   OOOOO    OOOOO   NN     N
               M M   M M  O     O  O     O  N N    N
               M  M M  M  O     O  O     O  N  N   N
               M   M   M  O     O  O     O  N   N  N
               M       M  O     O  O     O  N    N N
               M       M   OOOOO    OOOOO   N     NN

                     BBBBBB   U     U   GGGGG    GGGGG   Y     Y
                     B     B  U     U  G     G  G     G   Y   Y
                     BBBBBB   U     U  G        G          Y Y
                     B     B  U     U  G   GGG  G   GGG     Y
                     B     B  U     U  G     G  G     G    Y
                     BBBBBB    UUUUU    GGGGG    GGGGG   YY


################################################################################
################################################################################
y,RET:start game  q:quit c:show copyright w:show warranty s:show scores r:redraw

The moon-buggy high score table

You can still see the ruins of a crashed moon-buggy at the lower right.

     rank   score lvl     date  expires  name

       1     1000 1    2003-04-11  --   Thorin
       2      990 1    2003-04-11  --   Kili
       3      980 1    2003-04-11  --   Gloin
       ...
      68      330 1    2004-11-01  13d  Gloin
      69      320 1    2004-11-01  11d  Gloin
      70      310 1    2004-11-01  10d  Bofur
      71      309 2    2004-12-27  64d  Jochen Voss
      72      300 1    2004-11-01   6d  Bombur
      73      290 1    2004-11-01   4d  Bifur
       ...

		 your score: 309
		 your rank: 71

									 __
								      cnOMMnb
#########  #############    ############   ############   ############ o########
################################################################################
y,RET:new game  q,n:quit  UP:up DOWN:down b:pg up NEXT:pg down s:reload r:redraw
				    level: 2    lives: 0     score: 309

Download

The following versions of the program are available:

There is also an experimental, esound-based moon-buggy sound add-on:

The source code is also available on github.com/seehuhn/moon-buggy.

If you like my little game, you might consider buying me a present ;-)

Related links

• Nick Warne created Slackware Linux packages for moon-buggy. These can be found at the linuxpackages.net site.
• Moon-buggy is mentioned in the March 2003 issue of the Brave GNU World.
• There are precompiled binaries for the Debian Linux Distribution. They may be found at the moon-buggy Debian packages page.
• I am pleased to be aware of a Moon-Buggy Fanpage.
• The NASA web page has a photo of the real moon buggy.
• If you are a teacher and want to use the moon-buggy for teaching, you really should look at the great NASA's moon-buggy lesson ;-)