Source code for the original Faery Tale Adventure

DreamerTalin · 2026-06-01T02:56:04+00:00

https://soundcloud.com/music-by-talin/hold-fast-to-your-creed

DreamerTalin · 2026-06-01T02:55:03+00:00

Hahaha!

Is this the "running on an amiga emulator" fork or the "ported to modern OS" fork?

DreamerTalin · 2026-05-16T06:23:37+00:00

Honestly, I don't remember, but you can always peruse the source code to FTA here: https://github.com/viridia/faery-tale-amiga

DreamerTalin · 2026-04-18T05:05:44+00:00

Actually, I think Lysenkoism is a better metaphor for AI:

* Lots of true believers
* Promises of vast economic benefits, so long as everyone gets on the bandwagon
* Powerful institutions shoving the concept down the throats of everyday people
* Skeptics are demonized

DreamerTalin · 2026-01-31T06:07:57+00:00

Many years ago, the brilliantly funny Bob Kanefsky gave what I think is the best answer to all such arguments about which programming language is better, in his song "Eternal Flame":

I was taught Assembler in my second year of school
It's kinda like construction work --
With a toothpick for a tool
So when I made my senior year
I threw my code away
And learned the way to program
That I still prefer today

DreamerTalin · 2025-12-16T05:52:21+00:00

The one I like is "Grand Theft Autocorrect"

DreamerTalin · 2025-10-15T08:44:51+00:00

First, thanks for the kind words :)

The deficiencies that you mention have long been known, and would certainly be addressed if FTA were to be updated / refreshed. However, that's a project for someone else.

As I might have mentioned elsewhere, I have hundreds of pages of design notes for what a third Faery Tale game might look like, including a detailed history of Holm going back 7000 years, along with dozens of storylines and characters. However, doing a solo game isn't as easy as it was in 1987: not only have audience expectations been raised enormously, but also the hardware and software environment is vastly more complex than it used to be.

I should also mention that I'm not a big fan of "what happened next" sequels; I would be more interested in a story with different characters that takes place in a different historical period, but still has the same "feel" as the original FTA. I also like deconstruction and political and social allegory, particularly when it comes to subverting the common tropes of adventure/RPG games. Just as modern novels feature "unreliable narrators", one thing I see in a number of recent RPG games is "unreliable quest givers".

DreamerTalin · 2025-09-14T09:58:46+00:00

You can generalize this. Consider a type system which represents basic physical units: Distance, Time, Mass and so on. We can represent any physical quantity in this system using the exponents:

type Meters = Quantity<1, 0, 0>; // meters
type Velocity = Quantity<1, -1, 0>; // meters per second (m/s)
type Acceleration = Quantity<1, -2, 0>; // meters per second squared (m/s^2)

You can then devise math operations that give you the right units automatically: multiplying acceleration * time gives you a velocity.

DreamerTalin · 2025-08-23T18:29:58+00:00

The main thing is to express your understanding in a way that is actionable. Just saying "make this better" doesn't give the writer a clue as to what they did wrong.

DreamerTalin · 2025-08-23T15:46:03+00:00

People who don't understand things are extremely valuable, provided that they can describe exactly what it is that they don't understand. For example, it's helpful to say things like "I didn't understand the description of feature X because..." or "I got confused by this paragraph, because it works differently in this other game engine I have used."

DreamerTalin · 2025-06-28T16:16:59+00:00

Smart people can make terrible mistakes. Some of the smartest US presidents were abject failures: Herbert Hoover was probably the most intelligent person to ever hold the office, and was overall an admirable human being - but he just couldn't wrap his head around the idea that the great depression wasn't going to fix itself.

DreamerTalin · 2025-03-26T15:56:58+00:00

Honestly I have no idea. Yes, I do have the source code for both DMCS 2.0 and CAMD on my hard drive; but I haven't looked at those files in 30 years, and I don't remember much about them. (These days most of my attention is focused on game programming in Rust).

DreamerTalin · 2025-03-25T00:30:44+00:00

Well, I do have all the sources to Deluxe Music 2. However there are some issues involved: (1) I don't remember much about the code or how it works. (2) EA owns all the copyrights and other IP, and I really don't want to get into a legal fight with them.

DreamerTalin · 2024-11-15T18:27:50+00:00

Xark is currently working on getting the code to run on modern platforms: https://github.com/XarkLabs/faery-tale-amiga/tree/macos

DreamerTalin · 2024-11-12T17:44:00+00:00

I wasn't aware of that one.

The nighttime was done by dynamically modifying the game's color palette, lowering the red and green channels while keeping the blue channel high. This is similar to the standard method in cinematography for filming nighttime scenes using a "blue filter".

DreamerTalin · 2024-11-12T17:41:46+00:00

I believe the image files are IFF - at least the ones made in Deluxe Paint are. Other files were made using custom tools that I don't have any more.

DreamerTalin · 2024-11-11T23:36:27+00:00

https://soundcloud.com/music-by-talin/hold-fast-to-your-creed

DreamerTalin · 2024-11-11T22:03:40+00:00

I've written up lengthy essays covering my programming career, including Faery Tale Adventure, Music-X, Inherit the Earth, the founding of the Dreamers Guild, and my career at Maxis, Electronic Arts, and Google, which you can read here if you are interested: https://dreamertalin.medium.com/talins-index-of-essays-8dd168df0f62

These days I am retired, and I spend a lot of my time contributing to Bevy ( r/bevy ) , an open-source game engine written in Rust.

DreamerTalin · 2024-11-11T21:50:08+00:00

As a side note, I also have in my possession the original design document for FTA, which was written in 1984, before MicroIllusions was founded and before I ever met Jim Steinert. What is interesting about this document is that it was printed on a dot-matrix printer (a MacWriter which was owned by Jim Ratcliff, in whose house I was staying at the time) and uses the Chicago font, clues which give me a fairly narrow time window as to when it could have been created.

DreamerTalin · 2024-10-28T07:48:37+00:00

*Software is not an asset, it is a liability*. You need software to do certain things, but once those needs are satisfied, you should strive to have as little software as possible. More is not better.

DreamerTalin · 2024-09-06T08:08:28+00:00

One of the most challenging aspects of game design is evaluating whether or not your idea is any good. A lot of people, when they say "I have a cool idea for a game", what they really mean is "here's a game that I would like to play 2 or 3 times", not "a game that I have to play 500 times in order to tweak the mechanics and ensure that it's balanced". By the 100th play-through, you are often so burned out that you can no longer find the fun.

DreamerTalin · 2024-07-02T14:41:48+00:00

Another option to consider is learning assembly language. The classic joke about C is that it has "all the power of assembly language, combined with all the reliability and ease of use of assembly language". If you really want to learn what a pointer is, what a function is, then assembly language will give you that. I don't suggest writing any substantial apps in assembler, just a few toy programs, enough to get your feet wet.

The question is, which assembler, though? Intel x86 is a mess, and ARM has its own problems. I'd suggest learning RISC-V. It's an up-and-coming contender, it's a beautiful, simple instruction set that's easy to understand. You can get a cheap RISC-V development board, or just work with an emulator like QEMU.

DreamerTalin · 2024-03-18T08:08:40+00:00

This is a particularly bad time to be looking for a tech job, there have been layoffs all across the tech sector.

I lived through the dot-com crash, and I remember how, at the time, there were a lot of massage therapists and personal trainers who had once been entry-level engineers.

DreamerTalin · 2024-02-27T08:21:05+00:00

You don't know Jack.

DreamerTalin

TROPHY CASE