Where are the old dos-like RPG games? Can you say rogue? Nethack?

[torne]

This thread reminds me to ask the obvious or too stupid to ask quesiton (not sure which it is, but at least this is off topic): where is the x86 arm dos emulator plugin?  Did transmeta's stench smoke them out?  640kb is dos max, so should run on most of these boxes, no?  Sort of like putting 1950 hemi engine inside a yugo.

1) x86 is very hard to emulate, both in terms of writing the code (though we could get this from somewhere else) and in terms of overhead at runtime (it's very slow).
2) DOS is not limited to 640KB... only the 8088/8086 was. Most DOS games (except truly spectacularly old ones) will expect extended/expanded memory.
3) Your DAP has a keyboard, I assume?

[[Saint]]

I can remember playing Rogue on my Amstrad 64 (...with tape drive  )

If the virtual keyboard were "suped up" a bit to include shift+ and alt+ combinations it'd be a little easier to pull something like that off.

Not sure how "click wheel" targets would implement that though...

What's the minimum amount of buttons a rockbox target has currently?

Game inputs could be handled by using a "context menu" styled list of possible inputs for the situation.

Perhaps like:

Movement (forward, back, left, right, investigate*, open*, use*, etc. etc.)
Inventory
Spells etc

*things like this would need to call their own submenus (investigate X, Y, Z - Use X, Y, Z)

With a "story viewport" in either the top or bottom half of the screen displaying text outputs from the game:

You encountered a "whatever"
You take X damage
You inflict X damage
You see a "whatever"
You cast "whatever spell"

I'm no coder, but I'm guessing that something like this would be a real "labour of love" to build from scratch right?

I'd really love to see a text based RPG for Rockbox...


[St.]

[torne]

The original rogue had way less commands than nethack.

The minimum number of buttons is one, or possibly zero? The touchscreen targets

Someone could certainly *write* a text based RPG for rockbox; but porting an existing one which expects far more comprehensive input is probably not the best way.

In fact, this is one of my intentions for the Frotz port I am doing; once the interpreter is ported I intend to experiment with various Inform libraries which can provide menus and other less demanding input options, and make this available in a convenient form for people to write text-based games in Inform.

[torne]

There is in fact a version of Rogue ported to the Z-Machine, which should run on my port of Frotz.

The controls are hideous, of course; I currently depend on the virtual keyboard, even for single character input, so it'd be unplayable. I've not tested it, either, but the only significant limitation of the Frotz port is the screen size being smaller than some Z-Machine games expect so it should probably work.

I am nearly done with the initial version of the Frotz port, so hopefully I'll be committing it soonish and you can try. Better options for key mapping will come later

[Jason Arthur Taylor]

I am nearly done with the initial version of the Frotz port, so hopefully I'll be committing it soonish and you can try. Better options for key mapping will come later

Cool.  Looking forward to trying it out.

My sansa clip has 10 buttons.  Key combinations give infinite.  I'd say the best combination method is spoked radial selector that does NOT replace previous image (unlike the text editor), just overlays, like below, but with fewer (only 4) directional options.  If simultaneous keypresses can be detected you have even more.  We only have 10 fingers you know.  The fastest (non qwerty) keyboards actually have just 10-20 keys or so as I recall.  All of the consoles for the past 15 years up until I think the 360 are based on 4-way joypads, just like we have on a sansa or MS smartphone.

Like:
    A
    |
B--+--C
    |
    D
XORed and overlayed onto previous image for ~2 seconds or until right left up or down is pressed.
Here is another example:

[torne]

There is no possibility of having context sensitivity in a traditional roguelike, though. How are you going to arrange a radial menu so that 100+ commands are sensibly accessible? Your Clip has 10 buttons but how many combinations can you actually remember? How many are remotely plausible without having to do unnatural things with your hands? Chording keyboards are designed to conform to the hand(s) for all keys to be pressable in any combination mp3 players are not, and it's difficult enough to learn to use something that *is* designed for this

[Strife89]

iRogue is GPLed and has relatively few commands. Probably would be a pain to try and port, so I'm practically tossing this out there.

http://roguelike-palm.sourceforge.net/iRogue/