I installed a VBXE board in one of my Atari 8-bit computers recently, and I was batting around ideas of what to do with it. One of the ideas I had involved the 80 column text support. There are many text based games for other 80-column machines, and my favorite from years past was Moria. It's written in C, and since the Atari 8-bit has a great 8-bit cross compiler in cc65, I thought it might be possible. One issue is the fact that the data and code of Moria will not remotely fit into 64k, which mean bank switching. VBXE has 512k that you can bank switch into any 4k page boundary. What I came up with was a combination of using the VBXE's RAM for the screen, various data structures and the main cave array itself. That leaves little room for code, so the majority of code goes into an Atarimax flashcart-it became apparent that I would need the 8Mbit cart.

Here's a screenshot of where I am so far. This represents all the data being copied and banked into VBXE ram, all the init code running from cartridge, and about half the create character code running. You can roll up characters all day long, but when you press ESC it will go into an endless loop (since I haven't progressed further yet.) It may not be possible to finish this, but so far it looks promising.

The attached .bin file is an Atarimax 1Mbit cartridge. You can run it in Altirra with VBXE support to check it out.