itch.io

Yes, still valid. Since I wrote this I did design the EasyFlash 1CR cartridge, so meanwhile I'm pretty specialized in making cartridges.

Well, I guess a lot more people than you may think have have a dual SID setup nowadays. I can think of:

• People who did plunder a SID from another C64 to install a second SID in their C64.
• 1541 Ultimate II(+) owners have three SIDs in their C64. The original SID, and two addional SIDs provided by the 1541U2.
• Ultimate64 owners have three eight SIDs in their C64 as well. Ultimate64 owners have up to eight SIDs in their C64.
• Mega65 owners have two SIDs in their machine.
• Turbo Chameleon owners have dual SID.
• Quite a few people bought an ARMSID. And if it was an ARM2SID, they have two SIDs in their C64.
• Owners of the FPGASID have two SIDs.

Some of these pieces of hardware sold quite well, for example the 1541U2 sold thousands and thousands. There I expect that a significant part of the user base nowadays has a dual SID solution.

Personally I both own a 1541U2 and an ARM2SID, that I have installed in my Commodore 128. I have quite a few C64s, that all have a single SID, so I may not always use a setup that is dual SID capable. However, for a game that does support dual SID, I will certainly grab my C128.

Would it be possible to have a mode with two SIDs where the first SID plays music and the second SID sound effects? Or does that create problems with lack of CPU time or would you run out of memory?

When playing with Alyssa, she is able to brew mint tea, but she is unable to fill empty flasks at the river. You can to go to Chaeton to buy pre-filled flasks, and that way you can still make yourself some mint tea stock for emergency situations. Alyssa is also unable to pick up an empty flask in Baxter's house. I'm not sure this is intended, but I don't like this behaviour.

I think it is best if you try to finish the first game first, because the second one continues where the first one did end. The game is based on books, it's like skipping many chapters in a book if you start with the sequel now.

With 1541U2/Ultimate64 you have to explicitly save the cartridge contents after saving the game. The saved game is never stored in the existing .crt file, but if you save the cartridge contents in a new .crt file, it will contain the save game. IMO this is not very convenient and you can indeed consider to use a D64 file. Personally I consider Briley Witch Chronicles a big enough game to build a dedicated cartridge. I did play BWC1 from a dedicated cart and will do again with BWC2. I can now use my own designed device for that, the EasyFlash 1CR.

Considering how good the original was, it was easy to go for instant buy. Thanks for making this sequel and I'm confident it will keep me busy for many weeks.

I can't speak for what Sarah uses, but the CC65 compiler suite is quite suitable for developing for bank switched cartridges, regardless whether you code in C or machine code.

Is the disk version "smart" in terms of disk swaps? I.e. if I copy all files to a double sided diskette for my 1571, will it detect that it has all files or will it still ask for disk swaps?

You can use my EasyFlash 1CR for that. I designed it more or less with Briley Witch in mind and released it as an open hardware project specifically to allow people to build their own cartridges. But I also sell kits and ready-to-flash cartridges if you don't want to source all components yourself.

No Magic Desk required.

The SwinSID doesn't drive the bus during reads, so the value read from the POT lines is kind of random. That can indeed be interpreted as second button presses by a game, if the scond button support is always active.

Sure, no problem, happy to test.

IMO the exact number of lines itself shouldn't matter that much, a CRT will simply obey the vertical retrace signal when it gets it. However, changing the number of lines also means either you change the fps (which should be 50Hz) or the horizontal frequency (which should be 15625KHz). Since the 1084S accepts anything between 50-60Hz, I wouldn't expect you get issues with vertical frequency that quickly, the horizontal frequency is likely the most critical.

What does "completely out of sync with 50 Hz PAL" mean? On a Commodore 1084S (Philips), the intro picture is scrolling down vertically, doubt this is intended, but what kind of display hardware do you need to display it correctly?

Nevertheless... the VDC version is the best version. IMO your heavy efforts were well spent!

After thinking a bit more about it: If I would port it, I would target a cartridge. The TED architecture allows mapping 32KB of cartridge ROM and built-in bankswitching with 2 banks. This means that the speedcode that the C128 version uses, can move to cartridge ROM and be executed directly from ROM. 

The combination of speedcode and slightly higher CPU speed (compared to C64) may make the speed acceptable, allthough the Plus/4 still lacks the MMU tricks that you can do on the C128.

Choosing for a cartridge also allows solving the sound problem: The Plus/4 allows sound input from cartridge, so you could add sound capability to the cartridge. Perhaps a low-cost SwinSID or so, C64 users would look down on a SwinSID, but for a Plus/4 game it would be a game changer.

I don't think a Plus/4 port would be very attractive. Sure, the Plus/4 has a slightly more computer power than the C64, but no acceleration possibilities like running the game on a SuperCPU, Ultimate64, Turbo Chameleon or Mega65. Therefore you would experience the lower playability of a bare unexpanded C64 on the Plus/4, just a little bit smoother, but no way the smooth gameplay of the C128 or C64 accelerators. That "just a little bit smoother" would need to be balanced against the terrible sound capabilities of the Plus/4... end result might be a worse experience than an bare unexpanded C64.

Plus/4 ports are IMO attractive if you can take advantage of the high colour count of the TED, but for a monochrome game like this one...

I don't have a Zoomfloppy and thus no experience with the OpenCBM tools, unfortunately.

It may work: The d64copy utility has and --end-track command line option, so with --end-track=40, it might do the right thing. Wether it really works... needs to be tested.

An SD2IEC cannot emulate cartridges and is therefore unsuitable for Briley Witch Chronicles. You either need a device that can emulate EasyFlash cartridge or a real EasyFlash cartridge. Solutions for cartridge emulation are 1541 Ultimate II+, Backbit or Kung Fu Flash. If you want a dedicated EasyFlash cartridge for the game, that you can plug into your C64 and go, you are welcome to contact me.

Vice is the best choice if you want to run C64 on the desktop of your PC. If you want a more authentic experience (with low latency input & output), try BMC64 on a Raspberry Pi.

Yes. In order to prevent losing your game, you have to save your game to floppy before flashing.

Only Sarah can confirm, but the game is about 700KB large, so that is a minimum of 5 floppies and that would for sure be a lot of disk swapping. Perhaps an 3.5 inch diskette for 1581 might be possible, depends a bit on wether the game requires cartridge ROM to be directly adressable. If you are in need of an Easyflash cartridge, you are welcome to contact me.

BUG REPORT:

Henricus refuses to accept any Northern Cod if you have more than 5 in your possession.

The Backbit cartridge only has a partial Easyflash implementation, so I don't think that is a surpise. Just save on floppy.

I must say Lord Dudic has a strange idea of justice: Briley gets a baseless accusation of dark witchery and must stand trial in the town hall, while the Whiteheads attempt to commit a murder and all they have to do is pay a little bit of money. No trial, just pay, all your sins are forgotten. 10 x the price of a bread delivery... damn... if buying yourself out of a murder crime was so cheap in the real world.... the world would be like the wild-west.

I have uploaded my savegame here: http://www.freepascal.org/~daniel/brileysave.zip

I recently experienced something similar on a real Easyflash cartridge. The game did report that the save did fail, when trying again, the game did crash. Luckily I made a backup on floppy, but still, a few hours of gameplay are lost.

Carefully explore every part of the house...

I got fooled by this as well: I had tried those stones, somehow it didn't work, then I spent several hours searching elsewhere and finally did resort to a Youtube video to see that it really were those stones near Branwen's house. Tried them again, and yes!

I did use a lot of magic while finding the place to hide. I had a charged amulet and did wear an air shield. The Veritas were no match against the many "iceball" and "windstorm" spell I was firing at them.

If you still need them, I have the Easyflash 1.4.1 Gerbers.

A Versacart is waayyyy too basic for this game, notably it lacks the required storage capacity, has no bank switching and mp ability to save games on cart.

Easyflash is way easier to build because it doesn't need SMD components.

Kung Fu Flash and Sidekick are two more options to run the game. You can definitely build your own Easyflash cartridge, I did so.

Congratulations for being mentioned in the C64 article in La Repubblica. It doesn't happen daily that the C64 games are noted by mainstream newspapers.

daniel dot mantione at freepascal dot org

If you need help getting a physical Easyflash cartridge to install the game on, you are welcome to contact me.

The game screen scrolls both horizontally and vertically. This might be the reason the game is not compatible with NTSC.

Did you enable joystick emulation?

As coding a complex game for the C64 won't make you rich, I'd like to thank you for making this game, Sarah! I'm enjoying the game a lot and it is for sure of added value for the already rich game library of the Commodore 64.

It is not possible, the SD2IEC does not support 40 track disk images and does not support the fast loader used by the game. You can run the game on an expanded C16 using the procedure I describe above.