theelkmechanic

I ended up writing a banked RAM heap manager for the Unicode library I'm working on (https://github.com/theelkmechanic/unilib) for those same reasons. Once you start dealing with dynamic/unpredictable memory needs, it really becomes necessary.

I can see that. While the IBMs had business-y 80x25 with tall fonts, all the 8-bit machines tended to have square characters, so the 80x60 mode does feel like a really big C64.

I like the idea of 80x30 as the default, although the squished 80x60 letters remind me of my early career writing DataFlex code in Brief. (80x30 looks even better using an 8x16 font, like in a certain Z-machine that shall remain nameless. )

When's the ZX-Spectrum version coming out?

Finally updated after a long absence to work with the new r39 emulator/ROM. Kudos to @Elektron72's addition of headerless loads and to @Michael Steiland @ZeroByte for fixing banked RAM loads, so now I don't have to read the game files one byte at a time!

Finally got around to figuring out what broke file loading on r38. I think it was something in the new CBDOS implementation. To get it to work, I have to pass in $60 to SETLFS for the secondary address, otherwise the OPEN and CHKIN calls will succeed but the first CHRIN will fail. I can't just use the kernal LOAD routine because it assumes the first two bytes of the file are the load address and discards them, so it breaks the Z-code files. Anyway, it works now on r38, and I left v0.0.5 up there for anyone still using r37 (why?), and runs all the version 3 Z-code files I have. Next up I think the code needs a good refactor/reorganization before adding any new features/opcodes.

Revamped the character glyph mapping so I can have a lot more characters. Font is now in a separate file. Fixed a couple other bugs as well.

And Zork will work even better now that the random number generator works. (Previously, fighting the troll tended to blow the game up.)

Fixed some annoying bugs, so version 3 games like Zork seem to work pretty well. Added a file chooser so you can actually select the game file you want to load now.

Hi, Mike Ketchen here, anxiously awaiting the day I can get my hands on an actual Commander X-16. My first computer was a Tandy Color Computer (with the chiclet keys), which I traded for a TI-99/4a (TI Invaders was a particular addiction, just don't bump the machine or the cartridge slot will short out and crash it!), but when expanding that proved to be prohibitively expensive and it seemed like it might not be around that long, we upgraded to a Commodore 64 with a 1541. Started with BASIC, moved on to assembly language (even managed to crack my Impossible Mission disk's copy protection), and got as far as writing a couple GEOS programs. All sadly lost to time and moves, though. (I think my nephews ended up with my Commodore 128D. I wonder what they did with it.) But they started me down a software engineering career that's lasted three decades so far. Anyway, I stumbled onto the X-16 a few months ago and it and the whole retro computing scene have awakened a little nostalgia in me and given me a hobby more productive than killing orcs in Lord of the Rings Online. So I'm dusting off the 6502 brain cells and diving back into retro programming. The first program is Ziggurat, a Z-machine interpreter (I've always wanted to write one), available here and on GitHub. I may take the text windowing routines in it and bundle them into their own library. And also I don't know if anyone's working on a ZIP or TAR app, so I may tackle that at some point, too.

Ziggurat View File Ziggurat is a Z-machine interpreter written from scratch to take advantage of the power of the Commander X-16. Relive the nostalgia of playing your old Infocom adventures or new Inform stories. (Note: This is a pre-alpha release. Almost nothing works correctly yet. Please be patient. Development is on GitHub if you want to help out!) Submitter theelkmechanic Submitted 04/30/20 Category Games