Roguelikes on a franklin dictionary?

[PopTart]

Has anyone managed to port or write a roguelike into a simple handheld device with a qwerty keyboard, such as a Franklin dictionary? Some of them have a d-pad and like a 6x40 character display. I'd love to learn how to do it. I can program only in very high level scripts like BASIC and Lua. I'll probably end up connecting a simple character display onto a Raspberry Pi and going from there.

[Gwarl]

No work to do at all with the raspberry pi. Raspbian is GNU/linux and angband was written for UNIX. The pi is also many times more powerful than anything which existed in 1994 - it runs circles round something like a Pentium 2. It's actually easier to compile angband for the pi than it is to compile for windows.

I've looked into it myself, the difficulty isn't in running the software (which is entirely straightforward) it's in obtaining and attatching the hardware.

[Gwarl]

Oh and 40x6 is too small. Angband requires 80x24. I have a 5" screen which cost about $20 and is 800x480 pixels but like I say, attatching it is not straightforward.

[Derakon]

Originally Posted by Gwarl

Oh and 40x6 is too small. Angband requires 80x24. I have a 5" screen which cost about $20 and is 800x480 pixels but like I say, attatching it is not straightforward.

Presumably for 40x6 you'd be writing a different roguelike, rather than trying to port Angband. MicRogue is an excellent example of a roguelike that has a fairly "narrow" play area; each level the player has to get from the left side to the right while dealing with enemies.

[Nomad]

40x6 is enough to have a row of four 9x5 rooms, which is pretty small but seems workable:

 You hit the small kobold (5). --more-- 
<#.......+.........#....b....#.........#
.#.#######.o.###.o.#..#...#..#.###+###.#
.#..k@...#.o.#?+.o.+.b..#..b.+.#[+D+!#.#
.#######.#.o.###.o.#..#...#..#.###+###.#
.........#.........#....b....#........>#

[PopTart]

Originally Posted by Nomad

40x6 is enough to have a row of four 9x5 rooms, which is pretty small but seems workable:

 You hit the small kobold (5). --more-- 
<#.......+.........#....b....#.........#
.#.#######.o.###.o.#..#...#..#.###+###.#
.#..k@...#.o.#?+.o.+.b..#..b.+.#[+D+!#.#
.#######.#.o.###.o.#..#...#..#.###+###.#
.........#.........#....b....#........>#

Aw man that looks sick as hell! It's definitely time to write TinyBand or a from-scratch game for that size display.

I'd want to take advantage of the long screen aspect and design very linear dungeons with branching points (so actually a tree structure). I'll check out MicRogue.

Good to know that I'm in for a hard time with hardware hookups. I'll see if anyone makes tiny peripherals for the Pi.

[Pete Mack]

This comes under 'program my microwave from my refrigerator,' I fear.

(Unfortunately I can't track down the original quote on that--it was an editorial cartoon.)

Originally Posted by Nomad

40x6 is enough to have a row of four 9x5 rooms, which is pretty small...

.

[Gwarl]

Originally Posted by PopTart

Good to know that I'm in for a hard time with hardware hookups. I'll see if anyone makes tiny peripherals for the Pi.

As I say I looked into this and concluded that a small TFT screen was actually cheaper than an lcd character display of sufficient size. The only way you could justify using that sort of thing would be 'because I want to'. I also couldn't find any sufficiently small keyboards at reasonable prices: I'd except you'd have to build your own using an electronic component like the adafruit trinket and scavenging from other devices.

Actually check out adafruit for any DIY electronics, they have a huge variety of stock.

[PopTart]

This looks promising:
https://www.adafruit.com/product/3527

Thanks Gwarl

[Gwarl]

I just want to point out, for scale, that the circuit board there is a pi zero, around half the size of a credit card. That cable is a *mini* USB.