Fray Simon (English version)

This is an adventure for ZX Spectrum 48k

It was not yet dawn, and Fray Simon, from his small room at the far end of the monastery, hears strange noises from what is normally a very quiet cemetery. From then on, he will have to work hard to get rid of the evil spirit occupying the tombs.

It was programmed between 1985 and 1986, and was never published. In 1987 I contacted Erbe and I was preparing some improvements following the indications I received from Topo, but at a given moment the project stopped, I was studying in Alcala de Henares, with little time for anything else, and that's where it was left.

In 1990 I made some code revisions to correct some problems and converted it from Z80 to 8086 to run on a PC with MS DOS and give some color to the graphics with the first VGA 320x200. ( https://archive.org/details/FraySimon ).

In 2023, after some years in oblivion, the source code for Z80 was recovered, and the intention is to make the last technical touches and also some modification of the "script" to improve the playability. Many thanks to the colleagues of "Trastero del Spectrum" and "El Mundo del Spectrum" for the work of recovery and dissemination, and thank you very much Alberto Cuesta for the work to recover the sources of those flexible 5 1/4 floppy disks.

When I started with the first graphic routines in assembler, everything was done on the Spectrum, with the GENS assembler and for the graphics I used Melbourne Draw. It was quite a tedious process, especially when debugging problems that needed several tests, so in the end I used a Z80 (IR80) cross assembler on a PC and dumped the code and data to the Spectrum using a serial port pin, at about 7000 baud.

Today my Spectrum 48K is a bit older and coughing a lot, so I'm using Visual Studio with the "Z80 Macro-Assembler" extension to edit the code, I keep assembling it with IR80 using DOSBox, powershell to read the data blocks and code from the original image and relocate them in a SNA to try to save a few bytes, and finally I test and debug it with the EightyOne emulator. Quite an odyssey.

In the current version, there has been a major revision of the performance of the graphics routines and some difficult to solve script points have been corrected, however it is still a somewhat complicated game, like many in those days!

Hey look, Fray Simon is featured in BrewOtaku, The Homebrew Gaming Magazine at GamesCom 2024!

¿Prefieres jugar en castellano? Fray Simón también habla idiomas, puedes descargar la versión en castellano aquí: https://oi3code.itch.io/fraysimon

Controls:

O P Q A - Left Right Up/Jump Down

Z - Change selected object

Keep Z + Q - Take object

Keep Z + A - Leave object

N / Space - Use object

1 - Entering caves and gates

2 - Record game on tape or TAP manager

3 - Read game from tape or from TAP manager

OI·3 code

If you are going to play Fray Simon and you are thinking about making a small donation, go ahead! it's a great idea, and do the same with other retro projects too, as it will help to keep coming up with new ideas and projects for Spectrum. Donations will go to an N-GO (Next), who knows if Fray Simon may come back in a new adventure.

If you don't have a Spectrum 48K to play, you will need an emulator. There are many available for almost any platform.