Next, Here's what I never finished:

1) When you enter and complete each dungeon the crystal is not guarded. It was my original intention to add a boss fight in each dungeon, right now when you get to each last dungeon screen you can simply pick up the crystal with no fight.

2) Loading and saving to the AtariVox is not currently functional. You can use save states in emulation on A7800/Mame/Mess, however.

3) There is a slight screen flash when you switch rooms that very briefly shows unintended graphics on the screen. This is likely due to me overrunning the capabilities of the MARIA graphics chip in screen transitions and I have not yet addressed that.

4) In the graveyard area you will be randomly attacked live by skeletons rather than the typical turn based attack. I did notice some strange character movement issues during this attack sequence, in some cases you may not be able to move in areas that you otherwise should be able to.

5) I have a defined level progression in place, but because of the long amount of time it takes to actually play the game it's not well tested for game play balance. Same goes for the progression of how quickly you can earn gold with monster fights vs.  How much it costs to continue to purchase health potions and other items, it's not well tested for balance as you progress in the game.

6) Some items you can buy in the marketplace have no actual function in the game.

7) There are no sound effects and there is no music, right now this game is completely devoid of audio.

xxxxxxx

Special Thanks to David Exton for creating the amazing artwork.  There was (still is!) a planned release of this game on cartridge at the AtariAge store, I simply need to address the bugs and complete the game.

Welcome to the Apocalypse.

Death Merchant is a new 7800 game that was inspired by an old favorite of mine, Dopewars, which can be downloaded here. Dopewars is a DOS based text-only drug dealing simulation game and I used it's gameplay in this re-imagining of the original, along with some graphics and gameplay additions to give it a bit more of an RPG-like feel. It’s a 48K game written almost entirely in 7800basic, there are some assembly subroutines for the 24-bit math calculations. For the curious, I also wrote a Win9x version of Dopewars back in the 1990's, it was closer to a clone of the original. It won't run well (if at all) on Windows 7+, but fee free to check it out and download it on my home page here.

The game is set in a post-apocalyptic world, and the object of the game is to survive for 31 days and earn as much money as you can in the process by buying and selling survival gear. You set out with a $5000 loan for a month in the abyss, looking to earn as much money as you can while surviving your journey. You’ll have to deal with random events that occur when travelling that can help or hinder your progress. When the game starts, you’re presented with a main menu of options at the bottom of the screen: Buy, Sell, Bank, Stats, Travel, Doctor, Train, Fight, Lender, and Rest. On the top half of the screen you’ll see your current stats, your cash, and your current location on the left side, and on the right side you’ll see all of the items available for trade, the current prices, and the quantity of each that you currently own.

Progressing in the game requires that you travel, that's what triggers the start of the next day. Certain options are only available in certain cities so you'll need to travel to specific destinations based on your current needs in the game.

While the game has been tested and seems to work fine, this is not likely to be the final release and there may still be some undiscovered bugs. I may make revisions and post updates in the coming weeks (months?) as I make tweaks to the game. Certain stats may be adjusted as I play more to try and improve the balance of the game. There’s a lot going on, and I’m still working on making sure the game isn’t too easy or too difficult. Feedback about game play balance or any other suggestions would be appreciated. Major changes would be impossible at this point as the ROM is 99.9% full - notable changes would require removing existing features or functionality. It is possible to roll your score if you exceed $999,999, although I did attempt to make it impossible (or very difficult) to actually do that.

This game does not feature any AtariVox speech nor does it offer high score saving, and I’m aware that in-game sounds are somewhat limited. In that regard this game stays true to the spirit of the original. I’m limiting myself to 48k with this game (mostly because I’d need almost a complete re-write at this point to use bankswitching), and adding those features isn’t possible due to space constraints.

Below is a description of all the player stats and menu options to get you started. For emulation I highly recommend Mame over ProSystem, the colors look bad in ProSystem with this game. Mame is much more accurate. I haven't taken the time to test this on real hardware yet, but I am providing the .bin for anyone who'd like to try it out that way. Enjoy, and let me know what you think!

Statistics and Consumable Items

Knives
Knives are needed when you get attacked when travelling or when you start a fight. If you don’t have any knives, you will not be able to continue fighting or initiate a fight. Knives can be acquired by purchasing them from the Merchant or by randomly finding them when you travel. You may break or drop a knife when fighting. You start the game with 25 and and carry up to 99.

Health (HP)
Your health, or hit points, must remain positive or the game will end. You can lose health in two ways: by travelling when your Stamina has reached zero (-2 per day), or when you are attacked and hit by an enemy (-1 per hit). The only method to increase your health is to visit the Doctor in the city of New Vegas. You will be charged a random fee for your visit. You start the game with 99 health points, and the max value is 99.

Backpack
Your backpack is an extremely important item in the game, managing the amount of space you have is critical to success. You start out with a small backpack with enough space to hold 50 tradeable items. Your knives and food have their own inventory limitations and do not affect the amount of backpack space you have. When travelling, you may have an encounter with the Merchant, who will sell you a larger backpack that increases your usable space from 50 to 99. You may only buy the larger backpack one time per game, 99 is the maximum number of items you’ll ever be able to carry at once. As the ability to store items is key to success in this game, it’s recommended to upgrade your backpack at the first opportunity.

Food
Food is necessary to maintain your Stamina level. Food can be acquired by either Resting at the safe house in Bedford, purchasing it from the Merchant (who appears randomly when you’re travelling), or by randomly receiving rations when travelling. If your food supply falls to zero, you have an additional daily stamina drop of -1 in addition to the normal drop of -3.

Stamina
Stamina reflects your overall energy level. It affects your ability to fight, and also your health when it reaches zero. You cannot start or continue to fight if it reaches zero. You will lose 2 stamina for every day that you travel. The only way to replenish your Stamina is to rest in the safe house for one day, which is located in the city of Bedford.

Charisma
Charisma has two main effects in the game. Making purchases from the Merchant is what increases your Charisma. Once your Charisma reaches a certain level, you will receive more and more free items from the Merchant with every purchase you make from him. Higher Charisma levels will also start reducing the interest payments you make on your debt.

Dexterity
The higher your dexterity, the more likely you are to win a fight. You start out with a Dexterity value of 10, and will earn 1 bonus point for every criminal gang you defeat, and 5 bonus points every time you purchase professional training.

Menu Options

Fight
Fighting is random or manually chosen. You may be attacked when you’re travelling to a new city, or you can manually start a fight from the main menu at any time and in any city that you’re currently in.
When entering a fight, you will encounter a random number of criminals in a gang. During the fight, additional criminals may enter the fight, prolonging the battle, and in some cases you may not be able to escape and must complete the fight until you’ve exhausted your Stamina or knives, your Health is depleted, or you kill all of the gang members. Hits and misses are determined randomly, however the more often you fight the more likely you are to win (as your Dexterity stat increases). When you defeat an entire gang of criminals, you will gain a dexterity bonus as well as some cash and extra knives.

Travel
Travelling is a requirement in the game in order to progress. Travelling to a new city offers fluctuations in the price of goods, allowing you to make some big profits if you’re lucky. It will also result in many different random events occurring. Random price events may occur on some goods, resulting in dramatic price increases or price drops, you may find some money, food or knives, you may be attacked by a gang, or you may be stopped by the Merchant.

Lender
The Lender is the antagonist of the game, you start off owing him the amount of money that you start the game with. You Start with $5000 in debt and immediately have that much available to you. It’s a one time loan, you cannot borrow any more money during the game, you can only pay him off. Interest is charged daily, but the amount of interest he charges is modified by your Charisma and the number of days remaining in the game. Once Debt is paid down to zero, no additional interest is accrued and you are done with the lender for the remainder of the game.

Bank
Money can be deposited to prevent it being taken from you in a robbery when travelling, and also to accrue interest. Any deposits into the bank will result in a $500 per day interest payment, which increases to $1000 a day once you have more than $10,000 in your account. You cannot spend money that's in the bank, it must be withdrawn first and you may only visit the bank when in the city of Lost Angeles. There is no fee for Bank transactions.

Rest
Resting in the safe house in the city of Bedford is the only way to replenish your Stamina, and is also a way to increase the amount your food rations. Resting is free, but it does cost you one day of game time.

Train
Training is offered in the city of New Salem. For a fee, an expert will instruct you in the ways of knife fighting, which results in a +5 Dexterity bonus every time you train. Training costs a random amount of credits. You can train as many times as you want up to your Dexterity limit, at which point the trainer is no longer available.

Stats
The stats screen is informational and does not affect the outcome of the game. It will display some additional in-game statistics: the number of times you've trained, your total Dexterity bonus, your total Charisma Bonus, the number of gangs you’ve killed, the number of days you’ve rested, and the number of bank transactions you’ve completed. You can freely go back and forth from this screen with no penalty, and it can be accessed when in any city. The stats screen is also the "Game Over" screen when you die or run out of days, which you can use to track your scores and stats to try and do better the next time around.

Doctor
The doctor can only be visited in the city of New Vegas and is the only way you can replenish your health. The doctor charges a random fee, and will restore your health to the full amount (99).
The doctor is only available if your health is below 99 and you have enough credits to pay him.

Buy/Sell
You can select items to buy or sell only one item at a time. Move the joystick up and down to select the item you’re interest in, then move the joystick left and right to change the quantity of the item you’d like to buy or sell. You will not be allowed to buy more of an item than you can afford, and you will not be able to sell more of an item than you posess. The space available in your backpack is also verified, you will not be able to purchase more items than you can carry. After an item has been bought or sold, you are taken back to the main screen. The Buy and Sell screens can of course be accessed from any city in the game.

Merchant
The Merchant randomly appears throughout the game, generally around 0-3 times, but it's random. The items he offers are the same every time, and the prices are static throughout the game.
The Merchant is the only way to purchase a bigger backpack, and the only way to purchase Knives and food. You gain Charisma with every purchase you make from the merchant. As your Charisma increases, the Merchant will give you more free items with every purchase. As your Charisma increases, the amount of interest you pay on your debt to the Lender decreases.

Here are the known bugs, noted in November 2018, playing with ProSystem Emulator, which I don't actually recommend. Use A7800 or Mame!  These are just some random notes I made while playing.

When the death merchant gives you free items, and your backpack is still 50, it will allow you to go over 50.

If your backpack is still at 50, the max value to buy should also say 50.

One time, went to the bank for a withdrawl, and the number started auto counting down from 999,999. Left and came back and it was back to normal.

Death Merchant screen issue again. Just bought the expansion, then started buying canteens. The left number would count down by threes, and I could...
seemingly buy as many as I wanted without regard to the size of my backpack. I had $130,000 to spend. I ended up owning hundreds of items.

Again - another death merchant screen, and I could buy as many knives as I wanted, backpack space didn't matter, it just stuck at zero but I could
keep buying knives and my total cash would keep dropping. Not sure if knives are even set up to use backpack space, or should be?  Need to check.

12 days remaining and I had $780,000. I think it's still too easy to make that much money - maybe being too generous with the handouts from the merchant.

With 12 days remaining I had yet to have a single enemy encounter. First random encounter with 7 days remaining.
 

This game uses the much lesser used 320A mode which allows for a much higher resolution at the expense of single color sprites.  I chose it because I thought it was a perfect fit for a game designed to look and play similar to Night Stalker.  It also supports the 7800 high score cart and AtariVox saving and speech, there are three dozen unique speech phrases in the game.  There are plans for artwork and an instruction manual, neither of which are completed yet.  I higly recommend downloading the PDF version of the manual, as it describes key features of the game that you'd otherwise miss.  The boxed release of the game will include a brand new manual designed by David Exton.

It's complete!  Version 1.245 is the final version of the game that will be released on Cartridge (and a box & manual) for the first time at the Portland Retro Gaming Expo on October 17th, 2015. Shortly after the show it will be available as a general release in the AtariAge store.

Here is a video demonstration of the gampelay for Dungeon Stalker (v1.232, not the final release), created by AtariAge user Trebor:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sj4_JzNFqBc

You can view the original development thread on the AtariAge forums here.

You can view the original development thread on the AtariAge forums here.

You can view the original development thread on the AtariAge forums here.

Screenshots

3/18/2015 Update:  The links below have been updated with the actual completed Map Demo.  This demo accurately replicates the original map from Zelda. This is only a map demo and there's nothing to do but walk around the overworld and look around. There are no enemies, no dungeons, no weapons, nothing else. You can press the fire button to see a sample inventory/status screen. As I mentioned back in June, due to Nintendo's copyrights I won't be releasing an actual game with Zelda graphics and I won't be posting the code, graphics, or screen maps for this version. This is just a binary release to show what "could" be done.  Recreating this map was a huge undertaking.  There are a few map screens with incorrect colors and may also be bugs I never found.

You can view the original development thread on the AtariAge forums here.

Screenshots

First, download the Tiled app.