Snake 3D
Micro Focus COBOL Code Contest
Snake is a video game which originated during the late 1970s in arcades and has maintained popularity since then, becoming a classic.
The player controls a long, thin creature, resembling a snake, which roams around on a bordered plane, picking up food trying to avoid hitting its own tail or the "walls" that surround the playing area. Each time the snake eats a piece of food it gooes faster and its tail grows longer, making the game increasingly difficult. The user controls the direction of the snake's head, and the snake's body follows. The player cannot stop the snake from moving while the game is in progress.
A modernized Visual COBOL version ofSnake, by Marco Cavanna (Italy)
This modernized Visual COBOL version of Snake, by Marco Cavanna, took the contest by storm and by unanimous decision is our runaway competition winner. Marco was able to take a classic gaming experience to the next level by going 3 dimensional! Marco created what is probably the world’s first 3-d graphics gaming engine in COBOL.
Staying true to the original game, Marco even incorporated effects in this modern revival. Just as addictive now as it was then, a fantastic twist on a retro gaming classic – we loved it!
Source: http://academic.microfocus.com/code/index.asp
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SUCCESS STORIES
Our company has been using for several years a character-based business application, designed and developed by our staff in AcuCobol language and including more than 500 programs. In 2011 we invested in Visual COBOL for .Net development system in order to re-write the application by ourselves, but daily work commitments did not allow us to find the resources required to carry out the project. But then Micro Focus introduced us to Goodworks, a certified technological partner who, thanks to their automatic migration and modernizations tools, gave us a huge help in dramatically reduce the time of this porting: after only three months they delivered the Visual COBOL version of our application, we could not believe it! Next steps are the adoption of a DBMS for our application and the implementation of GoodWorks prototypes to fully leverage .Net technology value. Thanks to GoodWorks we are able to preserve our entire application investment and to flawlessly move and distribute it on the most recent and powerful platforms available.
Ing. Mauro Saglimbeni,
Carioni SpA