UR FINKEL 2026.09.2711 — no crash after a win, a piece home is an event

The first stable release of UR FINKEL, after a round of bug fixes and
play testing: both bugs players reported (#1, #2) are fixed below. This is
the version to download - the build on main can be ahead of it, and the
next stable version will be released here with its own number.

UR FINKEL is the Royal Game of Ur — the 4,500-year-old race game from the
royal tombs at Ur — as Irving Finkel reconstructed its rules, for the
Commodore Plus/4.

It plays inside a cabinet. Boot lands on a theatre front — frieze bands,
chasing lamps, a proscenium — and the curtains open on a royal fanfare to
reveal the menu. Four modes (vs URBOT, two players, two players with real
lots, URBOT demo), a rules screen, tumbling tetrahedral lots, the full
Finkel ruleset, URBOT narrating its doctrine turn by turn, and a victory
that pours a gold trophy and engraves the winner's name into its bowl. The
music is 19 transcribed duets written for TED's two voices.

▶ Play it in your browser — no install.
Recordings of the big moments are on that page and in the
README.

What's new in 2026.09.2711

The crash after a win or a loss is fixed (#2). Moving a piece up or
left made cc65 divide a negative number as unsigned, so the piece was drawn
45 rows off the screen — into the program's own code. The match carried on;
the damaged code first ran on the menu afterwards, and the machine jammed.
Every build before this one has it.

Both voices from the first bar (#1). Every written song now plays both
parts from power-on.

A piece borne off is an event. The laser writes bear them off the board
to your home, the count is cut in block letters — 1 home, 6 home — and
both sides' race is shown: pieces home out of seven, and pips still to go.

Against URBOT, URBOT is player one and sits on top; you play from the
near side of the board.

Captures are quicker — a quarter of the time they took — and the
fireworks after a win run for five minutes, now timed by the clock rather
than by the loop. Any key ends them. The half of every burst that flew left
or up was never drawn before; it is now.

Versions are the build stamp. The menu shows yyyy.mm.ddHH, and so does
the release.

Tested

• This exact build, soaked in VICE through three URBOT matches in a
  row. Every victory went back to the menu and started the next match. A
  watchpoint on the whole program saw no write into its code, and nothing
  reached past 256 bytes of the (now 1.5 KB) C stack. Left alone, the
  fireworks lasted 15 171 frames - 303 seconds; a key pressed during them
  ended them at once.
• The crash, before and after: the unfixed build jams at $38FA, the
  address it was reported at; five soaks of the fix at different start
  timings ran four times as long without one.
• Every build: host tests pass, and the binaries are byte-for-byte what
  a clean build of the source produces.

Downloads

The menu shows 2026.09.2711, which is how this build identifies itself.

File		Bytes	SHA-256
urfinkel.prg	the program - starts fastest	57 076	90befdac8e33610d0a099d77d25161e0b7675ed6769becb90fce71d9e499716d
urfinkel.d64	a disk image, for a floppy emulator or a real Plus/4	174 848	f3f64e899530804ceee193ef1abb3c4f6153d1af1cdfc35703844a34590f7d6b
urfinkel.zip	the offline collection, with its own emulator	4 964 604	f7edf00eb230d1b1edc72f75cf9e5901b154bdd7987f0c3a2334aa3f19d766d4

SHA256SUMS and MD5SUMS are attached: save one beside the downloads and run shasum -a 256 -c SHA256SUMS or md5sum -c MD5SUMS.

How to run them on a real Plus/4, VICE, YAPE or plus4emu is in INSTALL.md.