Reactor Raid 64: First-Person Droid Raid for the Commodore 64

Reactor Raid 64 is a first-person, real-time dungeon crawler for the Commodore 64 (C64), written in C with hand-tuned assembly for the drawing loops. It runs on a stock machine: a real C64, a C64 Ultimate, or an emulator such as VICE. No cartridge, no memory expansion.

You never walk the corridors yourself. You command a squad of **four droids** inside a procedurally generated base: shoot your way down the corridors, destroy the generators that power the place, then get out before it collapses.

See the Download & install instructions for how to load it.

Features

Procedural bases: every base is built from a number at run time, so the disk holds code and art, not maps.

Real-time first-person view built from reusable pieces in multicolor character graphics: walls with perspective bands, doors, ceiling lamps, a floor runner, crates on the floor.

Four droids, four weapons at once: a panel for each droid with health, weapon, armour and a ready light. Press 1-4 to fire that droid's weapon at the enemy ahead.

Three kinds of enemy, plus generators, drawn as animated hardware sprites that shrink with distance: the Killbot, the floating Sentry and the armoured Tank. They hunt you through the maze by the shortest path, so use the corridors.

A mission with a clock: destroy every generator and the base starts to collapse. Reach the exit in time.

Gear and a shop: weapons from rifle to cannon, four kinds of armour, crates to find and a maintenance bay between bases to repair, rebuild and buy.

A 4-letter password to pick up your progress and credits where you left off, shown in the maintenance bay and on the flashing game-over screen.

SID sound and music: a different sound for every weapon, a collapse alarm, a theme tune on the title screen, and a flickering ceiling light that plunges the corridor into darkness now and then.

A title picture with live effects (a glinting logo and shimmering reactor flames) and a flashing game-over screen that gives you your password.

Controls

| Key | Action |

|---|---|

| W / S | walk forward / back |

| A / D | turn |

| Q / E | sidestep |

| F | turn to face the nearest enemy |

| 1 2 3 4 | droid 1-4 fires |

| 5 6 7 8 | give the item you carry to droid 1-4 |

Keyboard only for now. In the maintenance bay: A repair, B rebuild, C and D buy, X leave.

Known limits

- Built for a stock C64 (PAL or NTSC). Tested in the VICE emulator only so far; reports from real machines and the C64 Ultimate are very welcome.

- The theme tune plays on the title screen only; there is no music in the game itself yet.

- No joystick support yet.

Download & install instructions

Download one of the two zips and unpack it:

- reactorraid64.zip: the standard edition.

- reactorraid64-fastload.zip: the same game packed so it loads faster on a real drive.

- `.D64`: a disk image. On a real machine or a C64 Ultimate or 1541 Ultimate: `LOAD"REACTORRAID",8,1` then `RUN`. In VICE, attach the disk and autostart it.

- `.PRG`: the program alone, for emulators and loaders that run PRGs directly.

The fast-load edition loads in about 60% of the time on a real drive. If it does not start, or the screen looks garbled, use the standard one. Neither has been tried on real hardware yet (only in the VICE emulator).