Software

Games and other programs written for the ACE and the machines around it. Each one lives in a repository of its own — follow the link for the source, for how to build it, and for anything the author has changed since. Everything here is listed alphabetically.

Cartridges

A cartridge boots the instant the machine is switched on, in place of BASIC: nothing to load, and no memory card needed. Writing a cartridge is the chapter to read if you want to make one yourself.

To play one, download its .crt and load it as a cartridge in the emulator, or burn it to a 28C256 and plug it into the cartridge slot on the board. The games all need a video card, and all of them are better with a joystick.

LightCycles by Jay Deaton. Tron on a 32 × 24 grid. The bikes never stop and never slow down — all you do is steer — and each one leaves a wall behind it, so the wall you have to worry about most is your own. Each player picks a trail color on the title screen.

Pong by Jay Deaton. One player against the machine, or two people at one keyboard. First to eleven wins. Player 1 is joystick 1 or WASD, player 2 is joystick 2 or the arrow keys, and touching a joystick takes the paddle back from the keys.

Snake by Jay Deaton. The grid game: eat the food, grow longer, don't hit the walls or your own tail. Joystick in either port, with WASD and the arrow keys to fall back on when there's no stick. The title screen remembers the high score, and on a machine with the clock card fitted it remembers it after the power goes off too.

VC83 BASIC by Willis Blackburn. A floating-point BASIC for the 6502, written from scratch and built for several different machines out of one set of sources. The build for this family is a cartridge, so the BASIC in the BIOS steps aside while it runs — and the Kernal underneath is still the same Kernal. Nothing prebuilt is waiting in the repository for this one: you build it yourself with cc65, and the steps are there.

Wizards Lab by A.C. Wright. Potions fall down a well three to a stack. Line up three or more of a color — across, down or diagonally — and they react and vanish, dropping whatever sat above them into new arrangements. Arcane reagents fall in among them: a fireball takes every tile of its color off the board, a bolt clears a whole row and column, a bomb the three by three around it, a star multiplies the cascade, a prism matches any color. Reagents match on color like any other tile, so you aim one exactly the way you'd aim a potion — and a reagent caught in another one's blast goes off too. Joystick, or WASD and the cursor keys. One set of sources builds the same game for the VIC-20 and the Commodore 64 as well.

Programs

A program loads into memory and runs there, leaving BASIC where it is.

Bit Rally by A.C. Wright. A two-ended Kill the Bit for the keypad. One bit runs back and forth across eight LEDs, and each end of the row belongs to a player: press ◄ the instant the bit reaches the far left, ► the instant it reaches the far right, and nothing else counts. First side to fifteen takes it, and ESC quits. It needs the pad and the eight-LED circuit from The KIM keypad, schematic and all. The program loads at $0800.

Adding to this list

Written something for the ACE, or for any machine in the family? It belongs here. Open an issue on this site's repository and say:

• Where it lives — a link to the repository, or wherever you keep it
• What it is — a sentence or two, the way you'd describe it to somebody deciding whether to try it
• How to run it — a cartridge, a program file, a BASIC listing to type in
• What it needs — which BIOS it was written for, then the video card, joystick, clock card, the keypad, anything that isn't on a bare board

It doesn't have to be finished, and it doesn't have to be a game. A tool, a demo, a language, half a game with the controls working — all of it is worth somebody else seeing.