Rogue 5.4.4 for ZX Spectrum 128K

▶ Play Rogue ZX128 in your browser

What changed in each release: CHANGELOG.md.

This branch ports the classic Rogue 5.4.4 dungeon crawler to the ZX Spectrum 128K. The browser player always receives the TAP that passed the bank-layout checks and the real-emulator smoke test in CI. Click the player's ▶ button, press SPACE, enter your hero's name, and press Enter.

The generated TAP can also be downloaded directly from dtz-labs.github.io/rogue/rogue-zx128.tap and run on a Spectrum 128K or a compatible emulator.

The port

The original 80x24 dungeon is retained in banked RAM and displayed through a 64-column Spectrum viewport: the whole screen is drawn in a 4x8 font, two glyphs to a character cell, so 64 of the level's 80 columns are visible at once. Code, mutable data, the dungeon map, inventory, and renderer are split across the 128K machine's pageable RAM banks. The port uses the Spectrum ROM keyboard and produces a standard multi-block TAP with a BASIC loader.

Current highlights include:

• procedural rooms, passages, mazes, monsters, combat, objects, and dungeon progression;
• an eight-column stepped viewport which avoids unnecessary redraws inside rooms;
• full-screen inventory, help, option, death, victory, and restart flows;
• a cold in-program restart after death, victory, or quit;
• pinned z88dk builds, linker-map guards, and an automated ZEsarUX gameplay smoke test in GitHub Actions.

Save files, persistent score files, shell escape, and Unix account integration are intentionally unavailable on the Spectrum build.

Controls

The startup screen contains an on-machine reference. The essential keys are:

• h j k l, y u b n — move in eight directions;
• SHIFT + direction — run;
• i — inventory, , — pick up, d — drop;
• q — quaff, r — read, e — eat;
• w — wield, W — wear, T — take armour off;
• > / < — stairs, . — rest, s — search;
• ? — complete command help, o — options, Q — quit.

Build and test

A z88dk checkout or installation is required. Build the TAP and verify the fixed and banked memory layout with:

make -C zx128
make -C zx128 layout

If z88dk is in a sibling checkout:

make -C zx128 Z88DK=../z88dk

Run it locally in ZEsarUX:

make -C zx128 run-zesarux-zx128

Run the automated emulator smoke test:

make -C zx128 smoke-zesarux Z88DK=../z88dk

See zx128/README.md for the bank layout, build overrides, testing details, and patch-stack policy.

Upstream relationship

This is a deliberately small ZX-only patch stack over the modern-rogue baseline at commit 546829b745ab8b1bca39b14f8bac5defd6c13fac.

The Unix build documentation from that exact baseline remains available in the upstream README pinned to commit 546829b. The complete pinned source tree is available upstream.

ZX-specific implementation and tooling live under zx128/; shared source changes are guarded by ZX128 wherever practical so the normal Unix target remains a regression target.

Browser emulator

The web player embeds JSSpeccy 3.2, licensed separately under GPL-3.0. The emulator, its licence and corresponding source link are packaged alongside the BSD-licensed Rogue TAP during the Pages deployment; emulator binaries are not vendored in this repository.

License and credits

Rogue was written by Michael Toy, Ken Arnold, and Glenn Wichman. This source and the generated TAP are distributed under the BSD-style terms in LICENSE.TXT.

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