Posts from August 03, 2026

If you've ever visited my main web site you might have stumbled on Grid Bike. This was a game that teenage me wrote on my VIC-20. I was bold enough to submit it to Personal Computer News, and ended up having it published in the December 21st 1983 edition.

I still have my copy of that magazine. I've also kept a copy of scans of that page on most versions of my website. What I haven't done, since the early 1980s, is play the game.

I suppose, at some point, I could have grabbed a VIC-20 emulator and typed it in. Or, if I didn't want to type it in (and I don't), I suppose I could have tried to OCR it and get it into an emulator¹. But of course I never did.

Then, a week or so back, I got to thinking: if I threw the two images at an agent, asked it to OCR the code, and then build me a web-based version of the game... could it manage it?

So, on a whim, yesterday evening, sat on a bed in a hotel in Whitby, I threw a prompt at Antigravity:

In this directory you will find grid-bike-page-1.jpg and grid-bike-page-2.jpg -- these are two scans from a magazine from the early 1980s, that contain a game I wrote for the VIC-20. I want you to OCR the images to pull out the code, understand the code, and then create a faithful recreation of the game as a standalone webpage, with the game written in JavaScript, so that I can play the game once again.

Initially it wanted to install PIL globally and kick off the work that way; I wasn't allowing that so I had to tell it to use uv instead and make a virtual environment in which to work. After that it didn't take too long to OCR the code, comprehend it, and write the website. The first version ended up looking far better than I was expecting.

What followed was about an hour of refinement as I got it to fix some visual problems (the characters it used for the lines didn't quite line up on the corners, for example), some audio problems (trying to get it to recreate the sound of the bike I had going on the VIC proved tricky, and it's still not how I remember it), and also a handful of playability issues when it came to mobile devices.

Eventually though it got to a point where, without question, I had a version of the original game, as I played it on my VIC, running in my browser -- both on desktop and on my iPhone.

I suspect it still needs some more refinement. The placement and layout of the opening text isn't quite right, I don't think, and the audio could still be better. Also, I'm finding the sound toggle button doesn't quite work as I think it should (depending on when you turn it off, it seems like it might or might not actually turn off the sound). I'm also not convinced the "Keyboard Controls" panel is as readable as it could be.

Without question though, it's playable and it's my original game, brought back off the page.

If you fancy having a muck about yourself, it's at grid-bike.davep.dev.