Awesome

uknc-desolate

Ported Desolate game from TI-83 Plus calculator to soviet computer UKNC (УКНЦ).

Thanks a lot to tr1p1ea for the original game! Thanks to zx-pk.ru forum members for all the help and support!

The main challenge was to convert ~4K lines of Z80 assembly code to PDP-11 MACRO assembler, in other words, to convert all the code to very different processor. Plus the usual stuff like difference in video and input. So the work took like 18 days to convert the code and fix all the bugs found.

Controls to use in the game:

Arrows - movement
Space - look/shoot
<kbd>I</kbd> - Inventory
<kbd>Q</kbd> - switch look/shoot mode
<kbd>P</kbd> - return to menu
Other keys (usually I prefer <kbd>Tab</kbd>) - close all pop-ups

Play the game online using UKNCBTL WASM emulator: https://nzeemin.github.io/ukncbtl-wasm/index.html?state=https://nzeemin.github.io/ukncbtl/desolate.uknc&run=1

The original game

Written by Patrick Prendergast (tr1p1ea) for TI-83/TI-84 calculators.

Links:

To run the game on Wabbitemu emulator:

Run Wabbitemu, select ROM file
File Open DesData.8xp
<kbd>MEM</kbd>, select Archive; <kbd>PRGM</kbd>, select DesData; <kbd>ENTER</kbd>
File Open Desolate.8xp
File Open MIRAGEOS.8xk
<kbd>APPS</kbd> select MirageOS
Select Main > Desolate

Tools used to develop the port

RT-11 simulator written by Dmitry Patronov, to run RT-11 commands MACRO and LINK directly from the Windows command line
UKNCBTL utilities: rt11dsk to work with disk images, sav2cartridge to prepare UKNC ROM cartridge
pclink11: to link object modules just like LINK command do, but mostly to test pclink11
VSCode as the primary code editor
Visual Studio and C# to write some code converting binary data (tiles, sprites, strings, tables), see the code in SpriteRotate folder

Emulators of the machine, to test the result: