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6502_workshop

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  1. The part I found complex was the tactical combat. I'm usually a fan of tactical combat but in Wizard's Crown it seemed to complex and perhaps more importantly to me, too slow (30 minutes per battle easily). When I played it back in the day I mostly used quick combat and since I started replaying it last month I've been exclusively using quick combat and it's been lots of fun.
  2. Yes, great games! It was interesting to see how they iterated on the system developed for Wizard's Crown for the D&D Gold Box games later on.
  3. You're welcome! Glad to hear you found it useful. This has been bugging me for years. Granted I haven't played Wizard's crown in decades but the keys are so weird every time I thought about playing Wizard's Crown again some day I vowed to do something about the keys. I haven't played Eternal Dagger but definitely plan to and when I do I'll take a swing at a similar patch. With any luck they carried over the same code for parsing the movement keys. On a historical note, when spelunking in the binary file I think I also figured out why they chose the keys they did. The Apple II did not have a numeric keypad build into the keyboard until the Apple IIgs was released in 1986. The Apple IIe Platinum had a numeric keyboard but that wasn't released until 1987. Wizard's Crown was released by Strategic Simulations in 1985. While an external numeric keypad existed at that time, most users did not have one. This product was likely targeted at businesses buying computers to run accounting software. Accordingly, the developers of Wizard's Crown did not appear to optimize the movement key assignments for intuitive use on a numeric keypad. The original Wizard's Crown movement keys were as follows: 8 1 2 7 3 6 5 4 Obviously, this was not intuitive on a numeric keypad but there was logic to it on the regular keyboard, because 1 is north and then number keys wraps around the compass in sequence, counter clockwise. But, in practice, all players I've talked to found those keys very clumsy to use on the regular keyboard as well. My best educated guess as to why the developers chose those original movement key assignments is because: a) most people didn't have the external numeric keypad. b) The ASCII values for the number keys are adjacent. For example, these keys are not assigned and I think could have been used for movement keys: I O P K L ; , . / However, the ASCII values of those keys aren't numerically adjacent so the code would have ended up with a pile of CMP/CPY/CPX machine opcodes to parse the keypress. Instead, the code uses a lookup table in conjunction with parsing the movement key and handing control off to the movement subroutine, which takes less memory than the alternative. Ultimately we're talking about a handful of bytes but when developing an 8-bit RPG, loosing a handful of bytes could mean having to exclude an important feature or piece of content from the game.
  4. I recently completed one of my Apple II bucket list items and created a patch for Wizard's Crown which modifies the movement keys to align better with the numeric keypad. The original keys were awkward to use, and chosen at a time when numeric keypads were not prevalent (1985). There were alternative key sequences that appear to have been available, but I am pretty sure they were not chosen to save memory. The patch includes a detailed write up of my observations. The patch is available on archive.org. The direct link is: https://archive.org/details/wizards-crown-numeric-keypad-patch -Mark Lemmert 6502 Workshop
  5. Thanks for your interest! The "limit one per customer" was a left over from before the 1st production run sold out. I just increased the limit to 3 per customer so feel free to order another. -Mark
  6. Thanks for your support and reaching out so we can help! Nox Archaist has been tested on physical Apple IIgs, IIe, and IIc systems, using CFFA, BOOTi and Floppy Emu cards (Smartport mode). I do not have a GS loaded up with modern cards, like the transwarp, on my test bench. However, many people in our Discord community have systems like this and are able to play Nox Archaist, so I'm confident we can get you up and running. The symptoms you are describing match a known edge case with the Apple IIgs / CFFA configuration and we have a beta release which fixes the issue with the HDV boot. It will likely fix the problem you are seeing on the .PO floppy images as well, however, the Nox Archaist floppy version requires two disk drives, so the CFFA virtual floppy port is not a supported configuration. Please email support at 6502workshop.com and I'll send you the beta. Thanks again for reaching out.
  7. You're welcome! Glad you got up and running. Thanks for sending the pics, fun to see!
  8. Thanks for your support! Before turning on the computer, try putting the Boot disk in drive1 and the overworld disk in drive2. The boot disk is the back side of disk1 if you transferred the images according to the disk and side numbers embedded in the file name.
  9. Thanks for your support, and sharing your story about Richard Garriott, very cool! Yeah, so many moments missed in life with phones before cameras ?
  10. Game Website: https://www.noxarchaist.com
  11. Thanks for your interest! Nox Archaist actually comes with a stand-alone application (click & go) which has an emulator under the hood. If you prefer to use your own emulator, here are some of the Apple II emulators we have tested the game on: MicroM8 (Windows & Mac) AppleWin (Windows) Virtual ][ (Mac)
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