adamantyr

The TIPI is the best way to play the game, honestly. Adam

Well I didn't quite make Christmas... But I did get it done in 2020! Realms of Antiquity: The Shattered Crown is now released! Digital edition is available immediately, collector's editions are in pre-order and will ship late January/early February. I've put together a website for it here, you'll find links to the store to purchase it on the product page: http://quixotic.adamantyr.com/ If you have questions, check the FAQ on my website for answers, and post here if you can't find what you need. I'll update the FAQ accordingly! Excelsior! Time to see how long before I have to release a new build...

OldDarkCaves.pdf

Finishing Realms of Antiquity!

Well our closed beta has only been going for a year... I had old demos from way WAY back. Was it one of those? As the software is being commercially sold I must respectfully decline to include it with the GameBase. However, I could make a demo version of the finished game that could be included.

Shhh! You never know, he may be a Time Lord.

Final collectors edition box arrived!

Also here are the cartridge labels I'm having printed up:

5 1/4" Floppy labels! And I do have 3 1/2" ones as well planned... however, I will have no means to actually create 720K 3 1/2" floppy disks, as I don't have the disk controller on the TI that can do it. Unless someone has a means to create them on a Windows 10 PC using a PC floppy drive but it will format for the TI?

Yes and yes. I have a bin file at the root. And it once loaded the final grom menu.

And on the subject... So today I received from Amazon a small set of 512mb micro SD cards. These have more than enough space for ALL the game data, and could potentially be used directly in a FinalGROM. Maybe. My experimentations haven't been working out. Either my FinalGROM cart is just flakey as hell or it's not working. If I put the cart binary on it's own SD card it works... sometimes. I've had to repeatedly press reset and insert/re-insert the cartridge for it to take. But on my microSD card, either it shows nothing or ONCE it showed the FinalGrom99 menu but it showed nothing I could execute. Even with the cart binary at the root level. Anyone have any suggestions? Maybe I need a better FinalGROM, I don't know. I am just trying to figure out how to store the data on it in a way that's the easiest to use directly.

No, the cartridge is something that will be provided as a BIN file so you can use your FinalGROM to load the game binary faster than you can from disk. (It runs marginally faster than most disk systems.) A cartridge would basically just be something pretty with a label that does the same thing.

I'm disinclined to re-engineer the game at this point for that.

To be fair, I've had that area designed for well over two years prior to Covid-19!

Something important to note, it's not "a cartridge or disks." It's "Disks or a cartridge AND disks. The game will not run on a cartridge alone.

I saw them on your site! I think you have 42 at the moment?

Yeah, most of those are "not working or not tested" disks. I got an offer though for a store of used disks from someone. That at least means I could offer the option to someone who REALLY wanted them that way.

Dev section. Technically still in development! I actually may have found a neat solution... I can bulk buy micro SD cards that come with an adapter, are 512mb (small sizes are hard to find), and also include a USB 2.0 interface/storage. I ordered some to test with the FinalGROM. If that works, it could store both the cartridge binary AND all the files.

As I work towards the final release candidate for digital, the tangible version of the game is also in the works. I got most everything worked out, except how to distribute the game to 99'ers on an actual media. Things like floppy disk stickers will be a given! And every game box comes with a digital version as well. A cartridge holding the game binary is a nice bonus because it will load faster than it does from disk but you still need the disk system to play the game.

Making stickers for floppy disks is totally doable! And a good idea. I should do a poll here on the forums for the media questions... It's the 99'ers who would have the most vested interest. Any retro CRPG enthusiasts on other platforms (and there's more than a few on my Twitter) will probably be cool with the digital version and a box of stuff without media unless they WANT to run it on hardware. I originally was going to just distribute the game for free, actually. But after spending all this time and realizing there is a sizable retro CRPG community out there that is actually trying to make some money, I realized it would be bad of me to do that. It would marginalize all the hard work everyone does.

So I finally received the prototype of my game box today... and it is good! I was very concerned that using an image alone (generated in MS Publisher) would not have the resolution to work, and I'd be forced to use an Adobe product to edit a PDF template, but the results are very good. I also discovered my initial sizes were a BIT small. The finished product will look different, I made a lot of changes with adding colored text, better overlaid text on the front image, and other tweaks. But I am happy to see the company delivered! Only real issue is it's REALLY expensive to print. You get a price break on quantity but it's still an investment to even get a few made. I need to find out just how many people would actually want and not commit myself to making too many at a time. How much? Well, I'm thinking a "game box with manual, cloth map, reference card and signed certificate" would be around $60 U.S. I still need to calculate shipping too. If that seems like a lot, don't forget you'll just be able to get digital only for a lot less! As for media, this is a weird one. I'll probably offer the box of stuff without media, as anyone who isn't a 99'er probably won't care to have physical media. Floppy disks are probably out; they're expensive to find these days, unreliable, and kind of an indulgence. I had originally planned on a CD-ROM. And that may still be the best way to go, but the CD-ROM readers are fast becoming uncommon to rare these days; many laptops no longer include one. A cartridge with the game binary (so that you don't need Extended BASIC, TI Writer or an E/A cart) is in the future, but I would want a digital version to be out first for awhile so I can burn one confident that there's no game-breaking issues.

Yeah, I suspected as much. What would probably have to happen is I'd have to sacrifice the lower-case character set for accent mark room. I should also add that most of the text in the game is compressed. I'd have to completely recalculate it for non-English, which will have different common ngrams.

I had considered doing some different language versions. Most of the game's text are in external files that can be updated easily. Some, however, are internal to the program and would require a specific code branch. There is also whether or not the game can be adequately translated with the regular character set; if accent marks are needed there is limited to no space for them. I would definitely consider it after the general release is done, though. For fun, I've added the raw text for one of the world disks, if you want to see what you'd be signing up for. raw-text-output.txt

I own this book, typed several of them in myself in the old days. They definitely aren't fast. On another interesting note, the author Seth McAvoy also wrote a junior fiction series called "Not Quite Human" about an android Chip who is built by his creator and sent to school as his "son" to test him out. Disney turned out a couple TV movies based upon it as well in the late 80s / early 90s.