Chips is a logic game, where the player have to build a computer from the chips placed around the professor's laboratory. The chips can be pushed around and if they are from same brand, they are connecting together. Eight same chips joined, will
create a board. The boards from different brands, joined together will build a computer. The star of the game is the professor, who can be controlled with the use of joystick or the arrow keys on the keyboard. When he pushes the chips, he have to be
extra careful, because if a chip or board have nothing else to stop it, it will turn back and hit the professor.
On the other hand, if four different chips are next to each other in a square, they are also not possible to push and the professor can not go further.
If the professor is hit by a chip or a board, the game is over and he have to start over, but the chips will be placed at different locations then. During game play,
the music can be turned on or off with the press of the M key. For switch between fullsceen and windowed mode of play, the Enter key can be pressed. If the player wants to give up or gets stucked in a bad position, he can exit the game with the
press of the Esc key. There is also limited time to be taken into consideration. If the computer is build faster, the player is rewarded more points to his score. The top five results are stored as records in the highscores table of the game. These
top scores can be challenged at later time.
The idea for the game comes from the classic Apple II game - I.O. Silver, developed by Beagle Bros, released in 1984.
In the late 1980ies, it was recreated for the bulgarian Oric Atmos clone - Pravetz 8D by Kalin Bogatzevski and published in the bulgarian computer magazine - Computer Za Vas.
The remake for Amiga, and later Microsoft Windows, was based mostly on the Oric version of the game. The graphics, created by Joar Berntsen are done from scratch. The music, created with the chip tracker AHX is by Wojciech Zytkowiak.
First version of the game was using the original Oric eight colors graphics, which were soon after replaced with better Amiga 32 colors brushes.
In 2009 for portability reasons, I decided to rewrite the game for the SDL library, making the game easily portable and available for more platforms and operating systems.
In the SDL remake, the original Amiga graphics are preserved intact and additionally animation of the main character is added, when he is moving around the laboratory. Furthermore the game was made available also for
Amiga and Apple MacOS X. For all the people, who love brainstorming sessions and logic games, the game Chips is a must have in the collection.