Dino Run

About the game

Dino Run is an endless runner with a single button. A small dinosaur runs along the ground, cacti come at it from the right, and all you can do is jump. Clear a cactus and you score a point; touch one and the run ends, with your score shown in the middle of the screen.

The challenge comes from the speed. The cacti start slowly, but they speed up at 3 and 6 points and keep getting faster until 40, and the jump always takes the same time, so the timing gets tighter and tighter. Every ten points the screen flips between light and dark with a beep, as a small reward and a sign that things are about to get quicker.

Playing it here

This is a CHIP-8 program. CHIP-8 is a small virtual machine from 1977, created for hobby computers such as the COSMAC VIP, and people still write new games for it today. Dino Run targets the original CHIP-8 and runs here in the Octo emulator. Click Play: the title screen shows the number 5, the CHIP-8 key that starts the game, which here is W or the Up arrow.

F2 saves the state of the emulator at any moment and F4 brings it back. A gamepad works too: Up on the D-pad jumps.

Controls

A few things worth knowing

Jump early as it gets faster. The jump is always the same height and length, so at high speed you need to take off sooner than feels natural.

Holding the key keeps jumping. If you keep W pressed, the dinosaur jumps again as soon as it lands. That helps with cacti that come close together, but a well-timed tap is safer.

Big numbers. The score uses the CHIP-8 hexadecimal font, so past 99 the tens digit carries on as A, B, C and so on.

Credits and licence

Dino Run was created by André Moreira (Andrezinrc) and written in Octo, the CHIP-8 assembler and emulator by John Earnest (MIT licence). Its author placed it in the public domain under CC0 1.0 through the Chip8 Community Archive. The licence text is linked from this page.