Some Genius Ported Portal To The Apple II
Vince Weaver is an assistant professor at the University of Maine’s Electrical & Computer Engineering department. He has a YouTube channel where he shows off some of his wacky mad science projects, and his latest was to create a port of Valve’s classic puzzler Portal to the Apple II. And he pulled it off!
To save disk space and increase processing speed, most professional Apple coders would write their games in Assembly language. But this guy? He actually created this with BASIC. You can see exactly how it was made, line by line, and that is just too cool.
Obviously it’s not exactly the same. It functions on a 2D plane, the puzzles have been simplfied and movement is much slower. It’s also still a work in progress and has just two test chambers so far. But it has a fully functioning portal gun and physics to match, plus GLaDOS’ chamber, all rendered in BASIC. You even get the Still Alive song at the end (complete with a giant ASCII cake). Talk about a labor of love.
You can download the latest version of Portal for Apple II here, and play it via an Apple browser emulator like this one.