Befunge to ETA converter

Copyright © Stephen Sykes, 2002.

I got a little bit interested in Chris Pressey's Befunge language, particularly after one crazy hacker wrote a chess program in it.

I thought that ETA should run chess too. But rather than write a new chess program in ETA, which I believe would not be too hard with my ETA Builder stuff, I thought it would be a bit of a challenge to run Dmitri's Befunge chess program in ETA. So I invented a Befunge to ETA compiler.

It's written in Ruby, and takes Befunge source on the standard input, and produces ETA code on the standard output. Oh, and it gives you a commentary of what it's up to on the standard error stream. Note that you do need to also download ETA Builder.

After I'd built the compiler, I could run any other Befunge programs - including the wonderful Hunt the Wumpus implementation by Wim Rijnders. This is the largest Befunge program I know of.

• ETA to Befunge converter
• Befunge chess source*
• Compiled ETA chess code - gzip or winzip
• Befunge Hunt the Wumpus source
• Compiled ETA wumpus code - gzip or winzip

* Note that this version of chess.bef is modified from Dmitri's original in order to show a progress bar when the computer makes a move. This is because the ETA version is really pretty slow, and it's really nice to see that it is actually doing something. I recommend using my optimising ETA interpreter to run it as fast as possible!