mwenge/tempest_fun

Tempest for Fun

Building Tempest for Fun

The source code for Tempest has been available since 2021, so let's build like it's 1980 again.

You Will Need

.. to install a few things:

sudo apt install simh expect mame build-essential python3

Now You Can Build and Play

make

Or you can just build:

make tempest

Tempest: T2K Edition

There is fun to be had. The 'T2K Edition' contains:

• French, Spanish, and German language packs removed to free up some space for:
• The first 32 levels from Tempest 2000 (the original Tempest only has 16!).
• Inspiring messages after you complete each level.

To try it out you can do:

git checkout tempest_2k
make

Or you can download it from the releases page.

Tempest: Map Pack Edition

32 quite crappy levels hacked together by reducing a bunch of svg icons to 16-byte vectors.

To try it out you can do:

git checkout tempest_icons
make

How Does This Work?

We're:

• creating a PDP-11 cartridge disk from the files in the src directory,
• launching a PDP-11 emulator,
• assembling and linking the sources on the cartridge disk,
• copying all the files from the emulated disk to our local system,
• then extracting the ROMs from the built binary (ALEXEC.LDA).

Once we have those ROMS we use mame to play them.

Do You Want To Know More?

This related repository has more information about the contents of the Tempest sources and how we turn them into working ROMs.