Welcome, fellow MEGA65 gamer! Here is the official guide to “Spring”, a new game for our beloved MEGA65 platform, written in BASIC 65 (via the Eleven IDE) and a touch of assembly to smooth over a few bottlenecks. What has our budding game designer, Moana, got in store for you in this game? Let’s read on and find out!
The hero in our story is a little girl named Spring.
Tired of the drudgery of going to school and doing homework every day, her heart longed for excitement and adventure. One sunny day while walking through the forest alone (as children are apparently prone to do in these stories), she perchance stumbled upon the lair of a pack of wolves sleeping beside a mysterious treasure chest that shimmered faintly in the dappled light.
Spring’s own curiosity as to the contents of the chest got the better of her, so she began tippytoeing as quietly as she could around the lair, looking for the whereabouts of a key she could use to unlock the chest.
Upon locating the key, she crept stealthily towards the chest, unlocking it, to reveal a colourful array of beautiful gems within, which she gleefully stuffed into her pockets!
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Alas, the clinking sounds of the gems jangling in her pockets awakened the wolves, who immediately began to give chase to her!
As she ran from place to place within the lair, she noticed there were other chests scattered around the lair, and other keys to unlock them. Her heart was pulling her in two directions:
“Just on more chest…”, Spring told herself, though all the exertion of constantly running from the wolves had made her both hungry and thirsty. Fortunately, the lair seemed well kitted out with an abundance of bananas and water bottles scattered here and there (though I’d be hard pressed to explain what purpose such objects had in a wolf’s lair 😁). As long as she kept herself well fed and hydrated, she felt she would be fine!
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Amidst all this frantic to-and-froing, Spring noticed one last peculiar item within the lair, a motley coloured carpet. As Spring stepped on it, it lunged her high into the air! This was a magic carpet, and as such, Spring was able to command its direction of movement with the will of her mind alone. The wolves fled in panic at the sight of Spring flying around on the magic carpet, much to Spring’s pleasure, as she enjoyed having a spot of revenge in chasing them around for a while instead!
Please be sure your computer meets the following requirements:
NOTE: The game presently needs my v999999 experimental rom (provided on disk) that it will offer to load up via the boot menu. Just click “Y” (yes) to accept updating to this experimental rom.
Why is this needed? The game uses SYS calls to run short assembly routines to relieve BASIC bottlenecks. The current official rom blocks interrupts during such SYS calls, which will cause stalls and issues in the music and sound effects.
Future versions of the rom will aim to allow for non-blocking SYS calls. When that time comes, I will update the code for this game to work with that future rom, and share that version on the MEGA65 filehost:
Once that happens, you are welcome to download that newer .D81 and copy its contents onto your floppy disk to update it too.
Your floppy disk has been tested and known to be working on the two MEGA65’s I have in my household (a devkit and an R3 release machine).
So while we’re reasonably confident it should work on your MEGA65’s floppy drive too, there have been reported issues in past MEGA65 games that were released on floppy disk, that some owners had trouble getting their floppy disks working with their drives.
If you find you are having trouble with your floppy disk, get in touch with me (@Gurce) and other developers in the MEGA65 discord community to see if we can debug and rectify the matter:
Please follow these step-by-step instructions to run Spring on your computer.
Controlling your hero Spring is relatively simple:
Joystick Controls:
Your floppy disk contains all source code and tooling that was used to create the game. Please feel free to browse these via the boot menu options. Any budding young game designers in your household are welcome to tweak, modify the source, graphics and music as they please! 😊
Get in touch with @Gurce on the MEGA65 discord server at:
The game “Spring” was brought to life by the following passionate individuals, we hope you enjoy it! 😊