Show HN: Below the Root (1984 game) ported to JavaScript

3 points by saulpw 3 days ago · 0 comments · 2 min read

As a kid, I loved this relatively unknown game, Below the Root. The world-building of the original trilogy of novels from the 1970s, is lovingly carried through into this side-scrolling "platform-adventure".

You can play the IBM PC port of this game online fairly easily, but the quality of the C64 version is much better (non-dithered graphics, better colors, polyphonic sound). However I found there was a lot of friction to just play the C64 version. So back in 2013, I tried restoring and packaging the C64 version of the game to make it just one step to play. I made a bootable x86 ISO with a Linux unikernel that only ran the VICE C64 emulator, pre-configured to launch the game from some .G64 disk images that a German hacker cracked for me. Took about 4 months of effort and the results were mid; the game would be running from VMWare boot in 5 seconds but it still required a whole VM, the sound was choppy, and save games were kind of a hassle. I made a basic webpage and shelved it as a beta experiment.

Then, for some reason about a week ago I decided to try again. But this time I directed Fable and Astra in varying capacities to dissect and disassemble the original .G64 images, produce a spec, and produce a Javascript version equivalent to the original. They got about 75% mostly autonomously in a single evening. I've since spent a few tens of hours playing it through, getting bugs fixed, tweaking the interface, improvements, and writing the About page. I had to have some difficult conversations with Claude and I made some unpopular decisions, but after all that, this is the result and I'm kinda proud of it. It's not a major project, but then it never should have been.

So I just wanted to share this game from my childhood and the process and the result. Hope other people remember this game fondly and enjoy playing it again!

No comments yet.