Tag: loadstar

Loadstar Finds: Zorphon

Loadstar was a disk magazine for the Commodore 64 that lasted for 22 years! I’ve been put in charge of organizing its archives. From time to time I’ll present something interesting from its thousands of published items.

Even though I’ve been spending a lot of time working on the Loadstar project, I’m trying not to overwhelm this blog with items related to this Commodore 64 disk magazine. So for the time being I’m restricting myself to weekly Loadstar posts at most. Maybe on Wednesday? How would “Loadstar Lendsday” be as a name? Hm, not great. I’ll work on it.

This week I bring you one of the most polished games Loadstar published, Zorphon by Nick Peck, from issue 39. Here’s some demonstration video I recorded and posted to Youtube (13 minutes):

While he did have a few miscellaneous other items published on its disks, Nick Peck only ever made two games for Loadstar. Both are great, technically impressive, programmed entirely in machine code, and challenging. (The other is Paragon, from Issue 50.)

Zorphon is a space shooter in the vein of Gorf, where each stage offers different gameplay. Zorphon has three stages that loop, although there is an extra one, “Genesis,” that plays before the first loop, that’s only encountered at the beginning of the game.

You have your standard-issue spaceship that’s locked to the bottom of the screen, that can only move left and right, like the ships in Space Invaders, Galaxian and Galaga. This poses special problems in the stage that plays like Centipede: if one of the purple space bugs makes it down to your ship’s level it’s done for, because it’s not possible then to shoot or dodge it at that point, so it’s essential to ensure that doesn’t happen.

I played this game long ago, when it had just appeared in the magazine’s September 1987 issue, and even though it’s a fairly simple game, its quality has stayed with me all these years. There are different ways to represent moving objects on the Commodore 64. The most obvious, and smoothest, way is using its hardware sprites, but there are only eight of them. You could use sprite multiplexing to reuse them as the raster beam traces down the screen, but that poses certain limitations on the graphics and gameplay.

Zorphon instead chooses a different means of representing enemies, it draws them on the character map. That means that the attacking aliens can only be displayed on character grid boundaries, which is a drawback, but it takes the cap off of the number of foes the C64’s VIC-II chip can display. You also get free collision detection: just check the register at memory location $D01E (53278) to see if the sprite that represents the player’s ship comes in contact with any background graphics data. This method means the collision detection is pixel perfect, the flag isn’t set if the sprite overlaps empty portions of a character cell. This isn’t always desirable, but the ship in Zorphon is large and chunky, so mis-detected collisions are unlikely.

Zorphon is, of course, in the archive of Loadstar Compleat that I maintain, although admittedly it is $15 there. You could also play it on the Internet Archive’s emulation of it. That is a “cracked” version though, which I find funny because Loadstar is for the most part not copy-protected. It will offer you unlimited lives, which is also funny since it’s a score attack game, and running out of lives is the only way for it to end. I think Loadstar #39 is also available there somewhere, but I can’t seem to find it easily.

If you decide to try it, by however means, here’s some tips.

All the stages of Zorphon are made more challenging by your ship’s limited firepower, having only one shot onscreen at a time. If you miss your shot you’ll have to wait until the other one exits the screen to try again, and that can take two or three whole seconds. Getting into a rhythm of shooting at monsters helps a lot, especially in the first stage, which is all about finding that rhythm.

The bouncing enemies phase of the first level, Genesis. Until you figure out how to clear all of them, you’ll be stuck cycling between Genesis’ two phases.

The first stage, Genesis, has two phases. The first end when you shoot enough of the red TIE-Fighter enemies, but to finish the second you must destroy all of the blue bouncing aliens within a limited number of passes. If you don’t get all of them in time, they’ll completely replenish, and if you fail at it again you’ll be sent back to the TIE-fighter phase!

The blue bouncing enemies are really hard to hit. I find it’s best to hang out at the left side of the screen and shoot the ones there. Every time they pass by, they distribute themselves again, and there will always be an enemy on the left side unless there’s only one left (which will move to the center of the screen).

Since Genesis cycles until you pass it, one way to get a good score is to purposely repeat it, letting the blue enemies reset and then fighting the TIE-fighter phase again. Once you know the patterns Genesis isn’t very hard, and can be easily farmed for points. It’s not a very exciting way to play though.

The Challenge stage, which is pretty hard!

The second stage, Challenge, will be the end for many players. It’s the Centipede-like stage, but your shots do nothing to the mushrooms! Many of the enemies wipe out mushrooms when they pass over them, which will help you out a lot.

To finish Challenge, you must wipe out two complete waves of centipede aliens, and a few pairs of segments that come in between them. After the second wave spawns, clear the stage of centipede segments and you’ll progress.

The third stage, Attack, is even harder!

The third stage, Attack, is really tough, and made harder by the fact that it’s so hard to get to it that you can’t practice it easily! Maybe getting better at it is a use for that infinite lives cheat on the Internet Archive version? Maybe! To finish it, I think you have to shoot enough of the bouncing asterisk enemies to pass it. Look out for the exploding bombs dropped by the flying saucers that come in from the side!

I don’t know remember if I’ve ever finished Attack and gotten to the last stage, but I seem to remember seeing a full loop at some point so I think I have. See if you can do it.

The History of Loadstar

Working on the Loadstar Compleat project has taken up a lot of time, so I keep trying to think of ways to use the things I’ve written for it here on Set Side B. This is the introduction I wrote (edited down to the history, mostly), and a shorter piece on the Eras of Loadstar.

A photograph of long-time managing editor Fender Tucker, holding a pipe in his mouth. (Fender is an adherent of J.R. “Bob” Dobbs, of the Church of the Subgenius.)

Loadstar was an incredibly long-lived computer magazine, distributed on disk, for the Commodore 64 and 128 home computers. It began in 1985 and its last issue was distributed in 2007, covering a span of 22 years. It had 250 issues of the main publication, 42 quarterly issues dedicated to the Commodore 128, and numerous side products.

About Loadstar

Loadstar was initially created at Softdisk, Inc. You might have heard of Softdisk as the prior place of work of several employees who left the company, founded id Software, and created Commander Keen, Wolfenstein 3D, DOOM and Quake. It’s possible that some of them might remember the Loadstar guys, but it seems doubtful.

Loadstar was distributed on newsstands up to issue 72, when it switched over entirely to mail-order subscription sales. Despite this reduced exposure, Loadstar soldiered on. Starting with #32, some issues of Loadstar contained two disks of programs and information. These issues became more and more common until, beginning with Issue 43, every Loadstar contained at least two disks until the end of its run.

Loadstar published lots of different kinds of programs!
The Video Pro-Titler may still be of use today, if you have need of a simple character generator!

Issue 44 began the reign of Fender Tucker, who would helm Loadstar for the next fifteen years. Fender lent the magazine a distinctive style. He’d write editorials describing the magazine as originating in the “Loadstar Tower,” a wondrous place looming over its home town of Shreveport, Louisiana. (The magazine was actually produced in a basement.) He’d also write up the adventures of his nefarious alter-ego and musician Knees Calhoon, who was listed as the author of some of Fender’s own software. Under Fender Tucker’s guidence Loadstar flourished, and garnered a devoted community of users and contributors.

According to Jeff Jones, attitudes at Softdisk were that the company’s Windows and Mac products were the future of the company, but eventually the internet came along and dashed that dream. Softdisk continued along as an ISP for a time, but around 2006 its services were taken over by another company, and it’s now long defunct. During Softdisk’s later years Loadstar continued to support a large and loyal userbase, and didn’t cost much to produce, so it chugged along well into the internet age.

As Loadstar grew, so did its community, and the technology around it. While the Commodore 64 computer was discontinued in 1994, a thriving market of add-ons and upgrades sprang up to serve its users. Probably the most notable third-party producer of Commodore peripherals was CMD, Creative Micro Designs. While Commodore themselves had made expansion memory modules for the C64, CMD took their ball and sprinted way downfield. CMD made a disk drive accelerator (JiffyDOS), powered memory units that could serve as long-term storage, accelerator boards, and even hard drives compatible with the venerable 8-bit machine. Loadstar’s staff used many of these devices in its later years to help produce their magazine.

Loadstar had a symbiotic relationship for about four years with Commodore’s own publications Commodore Magazine and Power/Play. Some type-in magazines would offer a disk supplement, containing all of the software in an issue on a computer disk and saving users from the need to type them in. Commodore had an arrangement with Loadstar to serve as the disk supplement of their magazines. This deal lasted from around issues 11 to 61, and helped bulk out Loadstar’s issues with interesting software.

Early issues of Loadstar often hosted ports of programs that originally appeared in Softdisk. One notable series of these is the Alfredo animations, a sequence of programs that depicted the travails of a stick man trying to survive a dangerous landscape. See folks, the genre didn’t start with Adobe Flash! Long after its parent Softdisk Magazine closed up shop, Loadstar published two final, original Alfredo adventures, in two of Fender Tucker’s last issues, #197 and #199.

Loadstar never distributed the Commodore versions of GEOS, Berkeley Softworks’ surprisingly successful bid to bring a mouse-driven, icon-based, Mac-like point-and-click interface to 8-bit home computers, but starting with Issue 58 and throughout the rest of its run GEOS programs were a regular fixture on Loadstar’s electronic pages. In retrospect, GEOS was done much wrong. Seeing the way the wind was blowing, Berkeley Softworks attempted to bring their OS to DOS-compatible machines with GeoWorks, only to quickly be dismissed as a budget pretender to Windows’ throne. GEOS was far from the first, and certainly not the last, Windows competitor to be steamrollered beneath Microsoft’s hardball tactics. (See: CP/M, PC-DOS, OS/2.) Judging by quantity, Loadstar may be GEOS’ biggest supporter that wasn’t Berkeley Softworks or Commodore itself.

Another company that formed an arrangement with Loadstar was Quantum Compuer Services, which served the Commodore 64 community with an online service called QuantumLink. Several early Loadstar issues came with the QuantumLink client software included on one of its disk sides. (At least one of our included issues has a copy, now useless.) Quantum eventually released a similar service for MS-DOS-based computers, and renamed themselves to America On-Line.

“AOL,” as everyone called it, become a runaway hit. They would build upon its strategy of distributing their disks far and wide, first as 3 1/2″ floppies, then as CD-ROMs, and eventually DVDs. QuantumLink was left to languish and, after a long period of decay where users complained of unmaintained upload sections and unmoderated forums, AOL unceremoniously shut it down without so much as an archive. The later history of AOL is generally known: they bought out their rival CompuServe, AOL keywords were broadcast during daytime television, it was a popular early choice for a dial-up ISP, it became the most-used ISP in the United States, and they created a hugely popular instant messaging program (AOL Instant Messager, or “AIM”). Then they underwent a disastrous merger with Time-Warner that would be hastily undone, then obscurity encroached as first the internet, and then social media, made most of it services redundant. AIM, once thought unstoppable, faded and died as more people used their cell phone’s text feature. As of this writing AOL still exists, but it’s fallen far from the days when its iconic “You’ve Got Mail!” catchphrase became the title of a Hollywood movie, proving once again, truly: what goes around, comes around. Eventually.

The premise of this movie will certainly age well. BTW, the more you find out about the history of movies, the more you come to realize this happens ALL THE TIME.

The Eras of Loadstar

The Early Issues
Loadstar started as a C64 counterpart for Softdisk’s self-titled Apple II magazine. Many of its earliest programs are ports of Softdisk software.

Commodore Magazine
With Issue 9, Loadstar became the official disk supplement for both Commodore Magazine and Power/Play. The programs from those periodicals helped to greatly bulk out their offerings. The arrangement lasted until Loadstar issue 61.

The Rise of Fender
Loadstar’s longest-serving overseer was Fender Tucker, a kind and genuine person with an engaging writing style. Fender joined up with issue 42, and starting with the next issue, Loadstar moved to two disks a month.

Jeff Jones, Loadstar 128 & Loadstar Letter
Associate Editor Jeff Jones joined sometime between issues 49 and 55 and brought some additional technical know-how to Loadstar. In addition to touching up programs and contributing software of his own, Jeff was largely responsible for Loadstar Quarterly 128, their publication catering to Commodore 128 owners, and the Loadstar Letter, a print supplement distributed along with Loadstar.

Puzzle Pages
Barbara Schulak’s first program was Jump, published on Loadstar #44, but starting with issue 60 Loadstar published a monthly puzzle section that became the magazine’s most enduring feature. From then, every Loadstar had a Puzzle Page until issue 163, but the feature continued, mostly monthly, until issue 197. Barbara Schulak wasn’t the only contributor to the Puzzle Page, and there were puzzles outside of it, but Barbara was its soul.

The End of the Newsstand Edition
Issue 7 was the last issue of Loadstar 128 to be distributed on newsstands, and issue 72 was the last issue of Loadstar 64 to be buyable that way. For most magazines that would have been the end, but Loadstar still had 16 years of life in it, sold entirely through subscriptions, mail order sales, and later via the internet, a testament to the faithfulness of Commodore users.

The European Age
At its height around 1991, Loadstar had around 20,000 monthly subscribers. Without the free advertising provided by newsstands, by 1994 that had dropped to around 5,000. As Loadstar reached issue 100 and long years passed, it became harder to find contributions from US subscribers. Meanwhile the C64 was still going fairly strong in Great Britian, and many of the games of Loadstar from this era have a distinct demoscene feel. Loadstar also published demos, and reported on Commodore hacking circles. Loadstar would also embrace the internet, and offer issues for sale by way of their website.

Dave Moorman’s Tenure
The writing was on the wall. By 2000 Loadstar had about 1,000 subscribers left, too many to just abandon, but not enough to remain profitable for their then-meager staff. Fender handed the reins off to the worthy Dave Moorman, who kept it going to 2007. Moorman was a dogged manager, and went to lengths to keep the magazine full of items, including frequently reprinting software from the magazine’s glory days. While many of Loadstar’s prior stalwart contributors didn’t switch over, Fender himself still wrote for the magazine, and kept up with it until the end.

The Tornado
In 2007 a tornado struck Dave Moorman’s house, and wrecked his Loadstar-making setup. While one more issue, #250, would eke out in 2008, the 22-year run of Loadstar, last remnant of the once-mighty field of computer software periodicals, was over. Loadstar had outlived all of its sister magazines from Softdisk (including its DOS, Windows and Macintosh publications) Softdisk Inc. itself, as well as Compute, Compute’s Gazette, Commodore Magazine, Commodore Power/Play, Ahoy, Run Magazine, Family Computing, Creative Computing, UpTime and DieHard.

(I have been reminded of the value of marketing, so I have to include the $15 Loadstar Compleat package I’ve put together with the permission of J&F Publishing.)

Jed’s Journey (on Loadstar 87)

Jed’s Journey is a fun little Zelda-like game for the Commodore 64. If you weren’t a Loadstar subscriber around 1993 or so, you’ve probably never heard of it. It’s one of the many programs from Loadstar’s 22-year run, which I’ve put up for sale (with permission of J&F Publishing’s co-owner Fender Tucker) on itch.io, but the disk can also be found on the Internet Archive. (We talked about making Loadstar available to people back last month, here.)

Jed lost drawing straws with his villager friends, and so it’s up to him to do something about all the monsters infesting his world. The monsters move quickly and randomly, so fighting them is a mix of reflexes, strategy and luck. Clear a screen and you get rewarded with coins, and possibly a potion that you can save for later. The potion colors are green for health, blue for invisibility, yellow to be teleported back to the starting point, and red to clear all the monsters from the screen.

Jed’s world is pretty big. If you explore for a bit, you’ll find treasure rooms with lots of money inside, a place to pay for healing, buyable weapon upgrades and keys for purchase. It’s not known at the moment if there is a way to win at Jed’s Journey, but the fact that the locked doors must be leading somewhere important suggests that there is. To even have a chance of reaching the end, if it exists, you should make a map of the world, and I mean by hand.

Jed’s Journey makes use of a hardware trick, seen in some sprite-based video chips, to get free collision detection. When the C64’s VIC-II is drawing sprites on screen, if two of them would be drawn on the same pixel, it’ll note a collision between them, and note this fact in a register. There are quirks to this system though. On the C64, this is pixel-based collision detection, not using hit boxes, which might mean occasional misses for players used to hitbox detection. Only two of the possible three colors in a multicolor sprite set off the collision detection. And the collisions only register which sprites are colliding, not what they were colliding with, which sometimes means, when you kill one beast, two others that were touching each other onscreen elsewhere will also be considered slain.

Will someone finally finish Jed’s Journey after all these years? Will it be you? If you try it, please let us know!

Loadstar Progress

I imagine some people look at this blog and think something like, “what the hell is its audience?” People who follow indie gaming, retro stuff, classic computer software, weird gaming videos? Should anyone be interested in all of that?

I answer, YES. It’s all important. I vouch for all of it. I want to cast a light into all of the corridors of video, computer, even electronic gaming! I regret that I only have the time and energy for one post a day! Everyone should know of these things!

One of those things is old computer magazines, and the example of those that I have the most contact with is Loadstar, the Commodore 64 disk magazine that lasted for 22 years and 250 issues.

I mentioned Loadstar lately, and the itch.io page I’ve put up distributing, with the permission of its owners, their archives 243 issues of its archives, plus many extras.

A lot of my time the past few weeks has been spend on the “Loadstar Project.” I’m working on an expanded edition of Loadstar Compleat, to make it much more accessible to people who don’t play around with computer emulators as a matter of course. Yes, I understand they exist!

I envision a custom-written program, offering lists of highlights from among the long halls of its archives. What are you interested in? Arcade-style games? Puzzles? Animations? Music? Art? Reviews of old software? Editorials from a bygone age? Dedicated lists of all of these things. You’ll be able to scroll through and pick something to try. One click brings up its instructions. Another starts it up immediately in VICE. Have a favorite author? Many of Loadstar’s most prominent creators will (if I have my way) have their own lists. With literally hundreds of items in each category, that will keep you going for a good long while.

There’s many technical barriers to making this work, but they are coming down, slowly, one after another. Here is what the menu looks like at this second:

There’s a long way to go. I have to reverse engineer the compression used for text files in later issues, for one thing. I have to finish entering the data for early issues before their Presenter system settled into a single file format. There’s tons of issues left to add to the system, preferably using automatic tools because there’s literally thousands of items here. And yes, the menu system looks really plain right now, and could stand some sprucing up.

I continue to push at the boulder. Sadly the world contains many distractions, and I have other things I need to do with my time. You’re reading one of them right now. But maybe it’ll all come together. Let’s keep our many varied appendages crossed.

I also want to shout out to the Reverend Dave Moorman, Loadstar’s last editor, who oversaw the magazine from issue #200 to #249. He graciously gave me permission to include his range of issues in the compilation, and they’ll be joining their siblings soon! He also has a book on Amazon: The Most Marvelous Machine: A History and Explanation of Computers in General and the Commodore 64 in Particular. If you bought a copy there, there’s no referral code on that link, I won’t see a cent of it, but I’m sure he’d appreciate it! Think it over?

LOADSTAR Compleat: Commodore 64 Disk Magazine Archives

This is something I’ve been trying to make happen for some time. But then some work I put into it hit an unexpected snag (the maker of a library I had been depending on decided he wanted to be paid a subscription fee to use it or else he was going to put a nag screen on people’s projects), then other things came up, and so the project languished for months.

So now, on the premise that it’s better to get it out there and available and add features and fix things later, instead of sitting on it and potentially nothing happening with it ever, I have put up on itch.io ⅘ths of the run of classic Commodore 64 computer disk magazine LOADSTAR, with the blessing of owner/long-time managing editor Fender Tucker.

This isn’t the first time I’ve mentioned LOADSTAR in these pages. The magazine’s name came from the commonly-entered command on Commodore 64 computers LOAD”*”,8,1, to load the first program on disk into memory, and sometimes also to run it. LOAD”(star)”, you see. I packaged one of its programs, Dungeon, for sale on itch.io for $5 some months back and mentioned it here. This is an opportunity to get the collection it was drawn from. I recognize this is a bit self-serving, but I don’t do it very often, and there’s so much on LOADSTAR that the world deserves to know about. The price of $15 is because that’s what Fender has always sold it for. The issues can also be gotten for free elsewhere, yes. This is mostly an opportunity to get them all at once, and with the Fender’s approval: the person most responsible for all of it, the driving force behind it, the one who always believed the most in LOADSTAR, its very heart and soul.

I had been working for an explorer program for getting the contents of issues and searching through them without having to load each issue individually, but it had been stymied by the issue I mentioned in the first paragraph. Something else I’d like to do is supply an emulator that will run the issues directly, with sensible defaults. The version that’s up has an absolutely ancient copy of VICE for Windows with it. It’s so old that I’m not sure if there might be security issues with it; I should probably just remove it. In any case, current versions of VICE are available for many platforms and are free and open source.

To start an issue, you first start up your copy of VICE. The Commodore 64 emulator included is x64, or else x64sc; the Commodore 128 emulator is x128. Under the File menu, choose “Smart Attach…,” then pick the issue from within the LS64 folder for Commodore 64 issues, or LSQ128 for Commodore 128 issues. Make sure to click the Autostart button: it’ll load the Presenter program and run it automatically! You’ll find both 1541 (*.d64) and 1581 (*.d81) disk images. 90% of the time you’ll want to load the 1581 version, because those disks were much larger and a whole issue could fit on one of them! The 1541 versions (which while growing up I had to put up with) are split up into four disk sides, and are a hassle. By the way: the 1541 disk drive was excruciatingly slow. If you press Alt-W, you can toggle “Warp Mode,” which will speed up loading greatly! Just be sure to toggle it back off once your program has loaded!

And something the collection really needs is a list of highlights of interesting things on each issue, and also a directory of the people who made this unbelievable wealth of software. Here’s a few names to watch for: Jeff Jones (Assistant Editor), Barbara Schulak (Puzzle Maven), Ian Adams (Mathematician), Maurice Jones (Card Game Implementor of Great Skill), Jim Weiler (Third in Command), J.C. Hilty (BASIC Game Programmer who never let it get him down), Nick Peck (Creator of A Couple Of Awesome Games), Jon Mattson (General Gamesperson) and Walt Harned (Pixel Artist Extraordinaire). If I could affix all their names in the stars for the world to see forever, I absolutely would.

To construct the itch.io page I needed some screenshots, so I dipped into a few issues to make them, and got the names of their makers along the way. Here you go, but understand this is only a tiny fraction of what’s included.

Zorphon by Nick Peck, from LOADSTAR issue 39. A rather polished space shooter! The aliens are drawn using character mode. I like the classic Astrocade-like font for the text.
Pipe’s Peak by Bob Blackmer, from LOADSTAR issue 73. It looks like an action game, but I think it’s more of a timed puzzle?
Outpost by Thomas Czarneki, from LOADSTAR issue 60. A fairly blatant Missile Command clone, but it’s well polished. The opening menu asks if you want to play to lose, or play to win. I think the difference is, playing to lose starts you on Wave 7.
King’s Ransom by Scott Elder, from LOADSTAR issue 68. An interesting little game, you control a greedy king trying to scoop up coins before they fall into the lava. When a coin falls off the bottom, a gush of lava shoots up! There’s also skulls to avoid. In one of those little touches that you sometimes find in LOADSTAR software, if you wait on the title screen you get to see a hi-res illustration of the gameplay.
Quadrilation by Dave Johannsen, from LOADSTAR issue 68. A two-player game, playable against a computer opponent with four difficulty levels. Take turns placing your pieces so they overlap with as many squares of the same color as possible.
Stream, hi-res art by prolific Commodore 64 artist Walt Harned and included as part of The Compleat Walt.

What I’m Working On: Dungeon DX

A few weeks back I mentioned Dungeon, a Commodore 64 CRPG system created by David Caruso II and published in 1990 on the disk magazine Loadstar. We’ve made it available through emulation on itch.io for $5. It’s here, and it’s awesome. It’s not just a way to play CRPG adventures but to make them yourself, and it even contains a random dungeon creation feature.

Dungeon’s map editor

I make it available with some trepidation. Dungeon has a few significant bugs. For example, it supports two disk drives throughout, but if you use its Dungeon Maker then you need to set it for single drive mode, or else you’ll encounter a Disk Error just at the worst possible time: when saving your project. Its randomized “Lost Worlds” often create dungeons that strand your character in impossible situations, and while there is a way out of them, it involves loading the Guild menu 15 times.

But I’ve played a lot of these random dungeons, and I think overall David Caruso II made a clever little game system, and I think his ideas are worth building upon. That’s why I’m working on a remake/update of Dungeon, that I’m calling Dungeon DX.

I’m making it in Python using the Pygame library. I’ve tried making a game with Pygame before and had some problems with it (I may bring myself to talk about that experience someday), but using it now I’m pleased to see Pygame 2 has become a lot more performant, and that’s even before trying to compile it into a faster form. I’ve built for Dungeon DX a kind of bespoke terminal emulator, but one with support for loads of cool graphics effects. I’ve made dungeon art and monster images for it using the website Fontstruct, which gives the images a low-tech, but distinctive look.

A collection of monsters, in font form, still being worked on. They’re reminiscent of the monster silhouettes from early editions of Call of Cthulhu!

I’ve been working very hard on it, to the extent that I can feel myself getting my hopes up that a substantial number of people may actually play and enjoy it. Most of the times in the past that I’ve done that I’ve had those hopes get crushed, but hey, maybe the nth+1 time’s the charm?

Besides not having all of its bugs, why do I think this project is worth working on? These are the things I find appealing about the original Dungeon, the reasons that I played so much of it myself, things that I don’t generally see in CRPGs these days:

  • It’s not a game but a game system. It isn’t a single huge campaign that you play and finish, and it isn’t a single story. Your characters can keep going so long as there are adventures to be had.
  • In structure it isn’t like a novel, but it’s more like a series of short stories. Each dungeon is a single screen, that fills out as your character explores it. That may sound a bit like a classic roguelike, and there are some elements of that, but the feel is subtly different. Each single-screen dungeon usually has more adventure packed into it than in a single roguelike dungeon level.
  • It’s like a collection of short stories, but that stars your character as they progress through it. The focus is more on the development of that character as they continue their adventuring career. Like how the Conan the Barbarian novellas are each an episode in the life of a single adventurer.
  • It features what’s known in some circles as slow character growth. D&D has rapid growth, and it’s gotten even faster as the system has changed through the years. 5th Edition characters advance to second level absurdly quickly, after earning only 300 XP, and that advancement practically doubles their power! 0th-level Dungeon characters (it starts counting at 0) have a lot more durability, but it takes them more time to advance to Level 1, and when they gain it their power only increases a little. In this, a lot more of a Dungeon character’s life is decided at character creation. But it also means, as they increase in power, you know it’s due to your own efforts.
  • It’s more simulationist that CRPGs have become as of late. A lot of CRPGs have crept towards gamishness, which generally is okay, I mean they are games after all. But I think RPGs work the best when you can imagine them as being the adventures of real people, so as their power has crept up, and their abilities have gotten more abstract and arbitrary, they have come to feel more and more like playing pieces than living people.
  • While there’s a random dungeon maker, you can also make your own adventures for it, and give them to other people! That’s potentially a very great thing. It reminds me of EAMON, an 80s CRPG game system that people could create their own adventures for. (There are still websites devoted to EAMON! It’s a rabbit hole worth exploring, but that’s something more suited for its own post.)
  • And finally, it’s hard. Characters die frequently. You can revive them up to three times, and if you don’t mind reloading the guild menu 15 times you can turn the game off to preserve their life, but defeat is frequent without very careful play. You often have to play like a scavenger: take what easy-to-find rewards and successes you can, build your power over time, seek out easy adventures, and don’t take unnecessary risks. Dungeon characters are not heroes, not at first anyway, and if they’re ever to become heroes you’ll have to watch their steps.
The current appearance of the new Dungeon Maker module

Because these are the aspects of Dungeon that I like, they’re the elements that I’m focusing on in making Dungeon DX. My plans aren’t to make it quite as hard, but to still emphasize that these people are not demigods, not yet. A character’s career may be the story of the creation of a demigod, like how Conan, through countless trials, eventually became king of a great nation. It’s kind of a lie that people who rise to greatness frequently do so because of their own efforts, but it’s a pleasing lie, and it makes for a fun saga if you don’t take it too seriously.

My other plans for Dungeon DX, which may change, for while progress has been rapid (because Python is awesome), I’m still iterating over lots of things:

  • A retro look, kind of akin to how Dungeon looks on a C64, but still with enhancements. It doesn’t use pixel art, instead using vector graphics created in Fontstruct.
  • Dungeon was all one-on-one fights. Dungeon DX should have parties of three characters, fighting enemy groups that can be larger than that.
  • Dungeon doesn’t let characters keep items between adventures. For the most part, characters only advance through gaining experience. DX should let characters have a persistent inventory.
  • Dungeon doesn’t have any money system at all! DX should both have money and a shop where basic necessities and equipment can be obtained.
  • Dungeon doesn’t simulate much of the basis of exploration. My ideas for DX let characters rest in the dungeon, for example, but they must consume food to do so.
  • Dungeon has very little graphical splendor. Dungeons themselves are just blocks of green, with black tunnels dug through it, and once in a while a graphic character. That has to change.
  • Dungeon’s encounter model isn’t scriptable at all, which limits what can be done. It’s a lot more flexible than you might think it would be, given the C64’s memory limitations, but the edges of what’s possible are still easily reached. I want to change that.
  • Dungeon’s magic system is very interesting for its own sake, a collection of 16 spells that are more useful outside of battle than in it. Only one of those spells that does direct damage to enemies! Magic is much more of general utility. While my design has more damage-doing magic than that, I want to keep that feeling that magic is not primarily for harming monsters.
  • Dungeon doesn’t let characters learn spells themselves: all magic comes from items that contain it, and depletes with use. There’s interesting things about that system, but it kind of means that high-Intelligence characters aren’t very viable if the dungeon constructor doesn’t give them any magic to use early on.

A 30+ Year Old RPG System for the Commodore 64

It’s been months now since I announced my plans to release some project involving LOADSTAR, a 17-year computer magazine on disk, either here or on itch.io, or both. I’m still working on them.

In the meantime, I present this, a packaged-up release of Dungeon on itch.io, a complete old-school RPG gaming system for the Commdore 64, as it was released on the disk magazine LOADSTAR back in 1990.

Written by David Caruso II, Dungeon is a way of creating adventures for others to play, and a system of creating, maintaining and playing characters in those adventures. It was kind of a throwback even in 1990 (the SNES was released that year), but it definitely has charm, and an old-school kind of appeal.

You start out on the Guild screen, where you create a character from one of five fantasy races, then venture out on adventures stored on floppy disks, which in this release are provided as C64 1541 disk images. Fight monsters to earn experience points, find the object of the quest and then return to the Guild by the exit to have the chance to advance in experience level. If your character dies they’ll be revived, but only up to two times! If something happens and you don’t make it back, but don’t die either, your character will be marked as “GONE,” meaning they’re stuck in limbo until they make it back to the Guild on their own!

Your character advances in level between adventures, but they don’t get to keep any items they found on their journey. If they advance in level however, they get to permanently improve two of their stats. Getting to the maximum score of 25 grants them a special ability, but it’s really hard to get there!

This presentation of Dungeon is being made with the permission of Fender Tucker, owner and former Managing Editor of LOADSTAR. It isn’t free, but for $5 you get the Dungeon system and five pre-made adventures for it, culled from the 240+ issues of LOADSTAR. I include a stock copy of the open-source Commodore 64 emulator VICE, configured for playing Dungeon. (If $5 is too much for you, rumor has it Loadstar issues can be found online elsewhere. Dungeon was first published on issue #74.)

If you want to know more about it, I have constructed this 40-page PDF of documentation on Dungeon, from the disks of LOADSTAR in 1990, along with the instructions for the adventures and further notes on playing it from me. Here:

dungeonDownload

(file size: 2.6 MB)

The document refers to an itch.io release, that’s what I’m currently working on. Late in the document there are some spoilers for a particularly difficult adventure using the system.

Dungeon was created by someone named David Caruso II. Neither I nor long-time LOADSTAR managing editor Fender Tucker knows what became of him. I have what is almost certainly an old address for him. It’s been 33 years, and I suspect that Dungeon itself is a couple of years older than that, so it’s possible that Caruso has passed away by now. If he hasn’t, though, I’d like to talk with him. I think (hope?) he’d appreciate that people are still thinking about his creation even now.

On The Red Obelisk

In 1987, programmers Robert Germino and David Todeshini wrote a weird and obscure Commodore 64 game called The Red Obelisk. It barely made a dent in the market, which is kind of a shame. It’s nearly entirely unique, which is a difficult thing to say of any game 36 years after its publication.

Part of why it’s not remembered much today might be how unique it is. It’s mostly a game about alchemy, but not as much in an Opus Magnum kind of way. You’re given an object, kind of like a gemstone, found in an asteroid belt. You shock it with electricity, zap it with lasers, and shoot sound waves at it. All of this is depicted in an illustrated laboratory, with surprisingly atmospheric graphics and sounds. Doing these things may increase its value. You can sell it at any point to earn energy proportionate to its value, which you need to run your ship and guard against hazards, and points. Your real goal though is to create a Red Obelisk

An earlier work of theirs was Sentinel, of which there’s even less information online.

I played a bit of The Red Obelisk and uploaded a recording to Youtube. I don’t do too well. Here is that video (7 minutes):

Both The Sentinel and The Red Obelisk, and another game I think they made called Phaserdome, were included on a disk called Master Blaster put out by Keypunch Software. Keypunch wasn’t a great organization; there are tales of them taking freeware games, scrubbing them of information by which their creators might be identified, and then selling that on a disk. It was before the widespread adoption of the Internet, the World Wide Web was still three years away, so it was easier to get away with that sort thing than it is now.

Later on The Red Obelisk got picked up for an issue of Loadstar, and the veracity of its editors I vouch for completely. I haven’t yet checked their products for the other games. Sentinel is also on Loadstar. The documentation I retyped below suggests they have another game on Loadstar as well. Both The Red Obelisk and Sentinel are on the Internet Archive, but you can get legal and paid-for copies for $15 of the first 199 issues (Loadstar was amazingly long-lived) via LOADSTAR COMPLEAT, still sold by its long-time Managing Editor, my friend Fender Tucker. The Red Obelisk is on LS64 issue 58.

The game is fully described in its instructions, below, so I’ll just give you some of my own impressions. It’s interesting! It has to have something to it for it to have persisted in my memory for so long. I think the game is implemented in BASIC with some machine code routines to handle the real-time portions. This is a perfectly valid way to implement a game; I did it often myself back then. It’s pretty much the only way to get the smoothly-moving asteroids and slick sound effects the game has.

What I remember the most is the Object Mode, where you zap various objects on your workbench in the hopes of creating a hugely valuable Red Obelisk. Everything you do costs energy, and running out destroys your ship, so efficiency is a must. In order to succeed you must take notes as to how each object behaves. Basic directions are given in the instructions: get the Tolerance below 100 with electricity, and the Temperature above 500 with lasers. Is that all there is to these tools? It has been too long for me to remember, but I do remember finding a string of Red Obelisks at one point, so there must be some process to it. Experiment to see what you can find.

The other thing I remember is the noise that your ship makes when you collect an object. All of the sounds in The Red Obelisk are effective, but that noise found a home in my brain when I played it decades ago, and it has never left. I think it probably never will.

What follows are the instructions to the game as included on Loadstar 58, as written by Fender himself, with section headings and minor formatting added by me.

THE RED OBELISK

by Robert Germino and David Todeschini

One of the safest bests of the 21st Century is that treasures will be found in space in the form of small meteors. They may be grey and drab-looking on the outside but inside will be jewels and precious gems, just waiting for the mining engineers to extract them. But it won’t be easy.

If you are a veteran of the universe of STURGRAT (on LOADSTAR #54) you will have an idea of the complexity of 21st Century space mining.

Setting


In THE RED OBELISK you are in control of a mining company. You must gather some object from space and by using the powers of your factory, you can ‘sell’ them for the maximum profit. Your goal, as is any capitalist’s, is to garner as many shekels as you can.

Let me describe your ship first. It is a Sturgrat space mining/laboratory and short-range fighting vessel. It operates in three modes, the Object Mode, the Mining Mode and the Attack Mode. You begin in the Object Mode (which is the inside of your laboratory) where you get a readout of all the capabilities of the Sturgrat.

Object Mode


The most important thing to keep your eyes on is the POWR rating in the lower right of the screen. If this gets too low, you will lose your ship, and, as is shown right above the POWR display, you only have two, not counting the one you begin with.

But your power is running down so you can’t tarry too long making decisions. And believe me, there are a lot of them to make.

You begin with an object on the conversion table. Its type is shown on the left. The idea is to process this object and then convert it into SCORE and POWR. You have to get the tolerance down and the temperature up.

These two values are shown on the left, TOLR and TEMP. You hold down the E key (for the electrodes) for a short period of time and notice that when you let up the TOLR has gone down. Get it down below 100. Press L (for the lasers) the same way to get the TEMP above 500. Since your POWR is going down all of the time, it pays to do these two things quickly and efficiently. They MUST be done for each object.

In the bottom left hand corner is the value of the object (VALU). As a true capitalist, you will want this figure as high as possible before you convert it into cash (SCORE).

You can increase the value of the object by bombarding it with Ultrasonics. Press U and then push the joystick forward and listen to the pitch of the sound. Press the firebutton and the VALU will increase by a certain amount. If you want to increase the VALU faster, push forward on the stick, the pitch will increase and so will the amount the VALU increases when you press the firebutton.

You can get too greedy with VALU. If you’ve increased it too high, the object will be destroyed and will disappear from the screen.

A good Sturgrat miner will write down the TYPE of object and try to discern the maximum VALU an object of that type can attain WITHOUT destroying itself at conversion. Write this figure down, too.

If you convert at too low a VALU, you will only get the VALU, but if you convert it at just below the ‘peak’ VALU of an object, it’ll be transformed into the incredibly valuable RED OBELISK, which, in more ways than one, is the name of the game. It’s up to you to determine each object’s ‘peak’ value.

You cannot do much more in the Ultrasonics mode. Press U to toggle out of it (if you are in it) and then you are ready for conversion. You do this by pressing RETURN. You’ll either (a) convert it for the present VALU, (b) create a RED OBELISK (which pays off handsomely) or (c) find yourself looking at a dreaded FALSE OBELISK. If you see one of these, you have to act quickly and destroy it by firing Caps at it (the F key) or by bombarding it with Ultrasonics. If a FALSE OBELISK is left to itself it will destroy your current ship and its cargo.

Mining Mode

Which brings up the question: Where do objects come from?

You have to space-mine them. Press the SPACE bar to go from the Object Mode to the Mining Mode. You’ll see your Sturgrat drifting through a meteor field. Use the joystick to maneuver around the meteors trying to capture the small, shining object that is floating slowly across the screen. The object must be captured DIRECTLY in the Sturgrat’s scoop. Even a small bit off-line will cause your ship damage.

You have a tractor beam which you can enable with the firebutton. It will draw the gleaming object up the screen where the action is less hectic.

As a matter of fact, the top of the screen is a safe place where you can scoop up hydrogen molecules with your tractor beam and slowly boost your POWR if you are running low.

You can gather up to nine objects at a time or you can gather just one and head back to convert it. To go back to the Object Mode, press RETURN.

Attack Mode

You begin your stint as space-miner with 3 ships and 3 Caps, but as your POWR gets higher (above 1500 megajoules) your Sturgrat becomes more attractive to marauding space-hijackers. When you least expect it you will be attacked.

The message says that you have lost the object on the conversion table and that the marauder wants to know if you surrender or not. If you surrender, you won’t lose your ship but you’ll have to continue with what you have. If you answer N to the surrender prompt you go to the Attack Mode.

This is the arcade portion of your mission. Move the joystick so that the cross-hairs are on the middle of the attacking ship and press the firebutton to fire. Keep an eye on your POWR level. If you are in danger of losing your ship you can weaken or destroy the marauder with a Giga-Gem by pressing the G key.

Giga-Gems can destroy any cargo that the attacker may have, so you should use them only as a last resort. When you have bludgeoned the attacker into submission he’ll ask if he can trade his cargo for his life. If you feel in a benevolent mood (or in a greedy one) you’ll probably do better accepting his offer and letting him limp off into space.

If you choose to destroy the enemy, you may be able to salvage some of his Caps. If you let him live you may get CRGO (objects), Krystals or Giga-Gems. Base your decision on what you need most.

The Krystals (KRYS) cam be converted in the Object Mode by pressing K. A Krystal is mainly a bonus score you get for defeating a marauder and being kind enough to let him slither off alive.

That’s about it. It will take a little practice with the controls of your Sturgrat but soon you will be grabbing objects and converting them like crazy hoping to find a level for each TYPE of object that will give you a RED OBELISK. As your POWR rating goes up you will have to fight off space-raiders more. Try to get the highest score so that you can head back to Earth a rich man.

As for the trip back to Earth, that’s another game, but one I’m sure Bobby and David will be creating soon. Sturgrat rules! Long may it run.

DISK FILES THIS PROGRAM USES: RED BOOT, RED BOOT 2, RED OBELISK, SPR1, T.RED BOOT

**** End of Text ****

Loadstar!

Now is the beginning of a fantastic journey!

Aah that’s a screen I haven’t seen in a long long time.

1982 saw the founding of the Apple II computer magazine-on-disk Softdisk. Soon after Softdisk Publishing produced disks for other home computers too. One of them, Big Blue Disk, has gone down in history as previous employer of some of the original principals of id Software, especially John Carmack and John Romero. But another of Softdisk’s legacies was their Commodore 64 product, Loadstar, probably the longest-lived Commodore 64 software publisher. They published C64 software from 1984 to 2007. And most, if not all, of it is available online!

Loadstar is yet another of those computer gaming stories that must be told, and I’m in a pretty good place to tell some of it, because I beta tested for them for many of those years, and sold programs to them as well. Yes, several of their releases bear the programmer name John “The Mad Gamer” Harris. You have to understand, this was long before the word gamer reached common usage. In fact, as someone who may have primacy over the use of the term, I hereby forbid its use by anyone with misogynistic, anti-trans or racist intent. It is so decreed, hey-nonny-nonny!

Loadstar was lots of fun. Every month they’d send you two disks in the mail with several new pieces of Commodore 64 software on it. Under the watchful eyes of Fender Tucker and Jeff Jones, and later on Dave Moorman, it’s not that they grew an empire of Commodore programs, but they did manage to sustain that platform for a small but avid userbase for far longer than you’d have thought possible.

I plan to start doing Loadstar reviews eventually, but in the meantime, you can try out some of the later issues of this important piece of computing history at the site linked below. Note that you’ll have to have a means of running C64 software to use them, of course. The emulator VICE is known to work well. And if you want to hear the words of Fender, Jeff or Dave yourself, all three are on Facebook.

The LOADSTAR Library

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