One man’s practically 40-year, 8-bit quest to complete his teenage Commodore 64 RPG

There are tales that a few of us, at a sure stage of maturity, ought to by no means hear. Not if we worth our time or our space for storing. I remorse to tell you that Mike Brixius, on his RavenWolf Retro Tech channel, presents simply such a narrative about his quest to finish his own Commodore 64 CRPG from 1984. He’ll be capable to do it, too, as a result of he saved all of the disks, tapes, notes, and hand-documented meeting code print-outs ever since his teenage challenge.

“It is a kind of free threads in my life that I deeply remorse,” Brixius says in his video. He hopes his Patreon supporters and YouTube group can provide him the “ethical help and accountability” he wants to finish his recreation in spite of everything these years.

Digital Dungeon Grasp (DDM) was based mostly partly on the Avalon Hill tabletop games Brixius beloved on the time, however extra so on Avalon Hill’s foray into dungeon-crawling RPGs, Telengard. Brixius wished to re-create Telengard‘s restricted line of sight however add in a floor world, akin to that of one other favourite of his, Ultima IV.

Brixius was working with out an assembler again then, one thing he deeply regrets. He doesn’t, nonetheless, remorse his pack-rat tendencies, which have left him with these items to drag collectively:

• Executable machine code, largely from Could 1985, however some from as late as 1989, with hand-written notes on it
• A printed-out reminiscence dump of all 4K of RAM from the sport in some unspecified time in the future
• Cassettes and disks, a few of which load, however none with an uncorrupted recreation operating
• Listings of the code from 1986, used to check machine language routines
• Intensive handwritten and drawn notes, maps, and different explanations of the sport’s design.

Up to now, Brixius has, by hand-typing in his previous code, gotten a facsimile of a easy overworld and dungeon working. He has already discovered one memory-saving repair, setting a single bit to outline every wall area (wall, open door, closed door, secret door) slightly than the two-bit system he initially devised. The sport takes up 12K of RAM, cut up roughly evenly between code and knowledge. Brixius figures his dungeons will be about 64×64 squares earlier than he hits the C64’s limits.

Patrons and YouTube followers might help Brixius determine which tasks and recreation points to sort out subsequent in every of his deliberate quarterly sprints. In the mean time, he has—with practically 40 years’ hindsight—determined to make supply management his first precedence, adopted by finishing his map code and fixing the colour scheme in dungeons. He cautions that he intends to maintain the challenge true to its early days CRPG roots; it “will not be as elaborate as one thing like The Bard’s Story.”

We first saw Brixius’ quest at Hackaday, and we’ll control his progress. He plans to complete it by 2024, however let’s all reduce him some slack on that.