Mol

Mol is a Baldur's Gate 3 Demake for the Tandy TRS-80 Model 100 and ZX Spectrum, built on the Dungeon Delver Engine.

Demo and Making Of:

Legal Musings

Mol should be seen as a piece of "interactive fanart." Other recent demake projects have been taken down, but I believe this should be fine for the following reasons:

It's not a paid product.
It will never be even remotely close to a 1-1 representation of its inspiration, and playing it will not be a satisfying substitute for the original experience.
- To that end, I intend to keep the overall tone a little lighter and partially based on memory. If it makes it far enough into development, it may even border on parody.
It does not require circumvention of any security features to run on the platform.
It's on a niche platform with a long-defunct parent company.

For now, this is the flagship project driving further development of DDE. In the event this does get taken down (despite my ironclad reasoning above), that library should be unaffected, as, on its own, it's a valid OGL-SRD 5.1 use case. All references to WotC/Larian IP and other SRD no-nos are contained to this repository. I've got a few ideas on where I could take DDE if this gets Lamberted, like more-advanced 80 family machines or an original campaign.

Running

TRS-80 Model 100

The Releases page should have the latest build of the project. You should see both .co and .hex files for each act (currently just act 1).

From Cassette

Thanks to majick, the build script produces a .co-formatted file binary file. This file is too large to work in the Model 100's built-in storage, but can be loaded up through the cassette interface. This is currently only confirmed working on CloudT, but should, theoretically, work on a stock Model 100 when loaded through the cassette interface as well. To run it on CloudT:

Enter BASIC, and run clear 256,43776
Click "Choose File," and select bg31.co
Run cloadm
When it's done loading, run call 43776

Physical Model 100/102 From Disk or TPDD Emulation

The .co binary can be loaded into memory via disk, on physical hardware. The easiest method is to use an emulated TPDD, such as dl2/dlplus or LaddieAlpha, with TS-DOS in ROM or with some other small DOS bootstrapped via dl

Assuming TS-DOS, since that's the most common:

Enter TS-DOS and press F5 to enable DOS-ON mode
Exit to MENU
Enter BASIC and run CLEAR 256, 43776
Run LOADM "0:bg31.co"
When it's done loading, run CALL 43776

This method has been tested to work on physical hardware.

Physical Model 100 with Just a Serial Cable

If all you have is a stock Model 100 and a serial cable to connect to a modern PC, then the dungeon-delver-engine repo has a two-step process with a loader script followed by a native loader program that can help you out. Refer to the dungeon-delver-engine docs for that process.

Virtual-T

Using the Virtual-T emulator, first run clear 256,43776. Then, using the Memory Editor tool, load the output .hex file starting at address $AB00. Once that is done, you can run it with call 43776.

ZX Spectrum

The Releases page should have the latest build of the project. You should a .tap file for each act (currently just act 1). With the tape ready, the game can be loaded and run with LOAD "". This has so far only been verified via the Fuze emulator set to the Spectrum 48k ROM, and has not been verified on physical hardware.

Controls

On all platforms, both arrow keys and WASD are supported for movement and navigating menus. ENTER is used to select menu options and interact with interactables. On the Model 100, the ESC key can be used to bring up the menu and cancel combat attacks and casting. That key is DELETE (backspace) for the ZX Spectrum.

Building

Basics

This project requires zasm and python 3. It also requires the dungeon-delver-engine submodule to be present, which you can get with git submodule update --init.

The build system is waf, which itself is built on Python, and the waf "executable" is versioned alongside this project. To use waf, you can invoke it with ./waf on *nix platforms, or use ./waf.bat on Windows. It's recommended, especially if you use other waf projects, to set up an alias to make invocation simpler (such as alias waf=./waf).

When you first check the project out (or after pulling down updates), you'll first want to run waf configure, which will set up some paths and ensure it can find zasm. This step will fail if zasm is not in your PATH, or if your python version is below 3.

After that, simply run waf to build all outputs and run unit tests. You'll usually only need to run waf configure after changes to the build script, or to make changes to your selected options.

ZX Spectrum (Experimental)

The ZX Spectrum build is currently disabled by default until stabilized. To enable it, pass zx_spectrum to waf configure's --platform option. You can supply it on its own, or with both platforms:

# Spectrum on its own
waf configure --platforms=zx_spectrum
# Spectrum and Model 100
waf configure --platforms=trs80_m100,zx_spectrum

When you select the zx_spectrum platform, waf configure will also ensure you have bin2tap (from zxspectrum-utils) available in your path. This is required to package the raw binary output from zasm into a tape format with a BASIC bootloader.

Note: The reason this is disabled by default is that the build will currently fail on the first pass when calling bin2tap. Simply invoking waf multiple times does eventually produce a working tap file.

majick / mol

Mol