Not much time to work on Larry or its surrounding projects today. Read up on the cartridge formats most of yesterday and decided on implementing EasyFlash as a CRT image. The CRT format seems to be canonically defined by the VICE emulator nowadays, so that’s what I’m going to use. The main problem there is a lack of scriptable tooling. I will not proceed with a game of this size without the ability to automate the build process.

The C64 community on Twitter pointed me in the direction of releasing Larry in a cartridge format. That’s something I never even considered because it used to mean creating physical hardware. Nowadays cartridges are just files so it could be useful, so next steps: figure out what they are and how they work.

In the last post I explored why porting the AGI engine would be a fruitless endeavour. So now what? Hand-code the whole thing 6502 Assembler! Yes! Well, sure, but how to go about that? This blog describes some of the design choices I made while weighing my options on the Commodore 64.

Back in 1987 Sierra OnLine released an adventure game that shaped a significant part of my “gaming upbringing”. Leisure Suit Larry may not have been very appropriate for my 10 year-old self but it was fun! Walk the guy around a city and try to get him to do all sorts of things in order to finally win the game. The game came out on the IBM PC, which is also what I played it on. Later on, I saw the very bad Amiga port and at some point I wondered why it never came out for the C64. Looking for a hobby project, I decided to bite off a lot more than I can chew and started porting the game.