Grizzards

TL;DR — A turn-based RPG beta release that requires SaveKey or AtariVox.

Building: make at the top level

Build requires: 64tass, sbcl, and some other stuff.

Copyright © 2021-2022, Bruce-Robert Pocock

https://star-hope.org/games/Grizzards/

You see, what had happened was …

This is a turn-based RPG for the Atari 2600. The demo version (linked below) requires only an F4 (32kiB) bank switched cartridge, and a SaveKey device.

The full build is 64kiB (EF banked) and can be compiled for SaveKey or for its own proprietary AtariAge cartridge with built-in save game support.

How to Play

Check the Manual for full detailed instructions.

Testing

This has been somewhat thoroughly tested, mostly in Stella, but also with a real (4 switch) NTSC 2600 woody, a 2600 vader, and a 7800, using Harmony, Plus, & Uno carts and SaveKey and AtariVox.

If the game crashes, you'll likely get sent to the screen with a white sad face. If it's unable to communicate with the SaveKey (MemCard, AtariVox save function) you'll get a red sad face; that's not a bug, just a limitation. "MEMORY DEVICE NEEDED," as it says.

Naturally, I'm excited to see any feedback.

Development

Check out Guts.txt for a (usually out-of-date) overview

Credits

Program, art, etc. — Bruce-Robert Pocock.

Music, manual cover and additional artwork — Zephyr Salz

Full credits in the manual

And, of course thanks to everyone in the Stella and AtariAge communities for making this game possible.

How To Build

First off, you'll probably want a Linux® system as this build process has not been tested under macOS and is very unlikely to work with Windows (since most of the tools are missing).

Make sure you have installed:

• SBCL (Steel Bank Common Lisp)
• Perl 5(.x)
• XeLaTeX
• 64tass (Turbo Assembler)
• GNU Make

and, to test:

• Stella

and, to burn EPROMS:

• MiniPro USB recording tools, a MiniPro USB EPROM burner, and AT27C256 or AT27C512 EPROMs or compatible.

On Fedora, you can install prerequisite packages with

     sudo dnf -y install $(<packages)

If you run into trouble with SBCL not auto-loading a Quicklisp package (I'm not sure why this sometimes occurs on a fresh install), then try running sbcl (or, better, rlwrap sbcl) and enter:

       (load "~/quicklisp/setup.lisp")
       (ql:quickload "the-package-name")
       (quit)

The next time you run make it will probably find the packages just fine. I imagine this is a limitation of my setup script not being smart enough.

cd into the top-level directory and run make demo to build the demo software for all three regions (NTSC, PAL, and SECAM) into the Dist directory.

To build and playtest, run make stella for NTSC, or make stella-pal or make stella-secam for the other regions.

To burn an EPROM, run make cart-ntsc, make cart-pal, or make cart-secam

If you have a Harmony or Uno cartridge and mount the SD card under /run/media/${USER}/HARMONY or /run/media/${USER}/TBA_2600, which are the default mount points and SD disk labels for those devices respectively on Fedora at least, you can write to the top level directory with make harmony or make uno. It may be just as easy to make demo and copy the .a26 files over directly.