HOME.BASE

HOME.BASE 1.0, six disk sides, played here on an emulated Apple IIe (Apple2TS).

HOME.BASE is the first game. It is 3:47 AM in Nestwell Meadows, every clock in the neighbourhood says so, and your house will not let you leave: the system is keeping you safe, it says, and the gate opens at sunrise, which it has quietly cancelled. A text adventure with pictures across six disk sides: get out of the house, cross the cul-de-sac, learn the rules at the clubhouse, fake a sunrise, and decide what to do with the thing in the fridge. It was Whitney Design Labs' first title for the Apple IIe and the proof that the engine behind both games could run on a forty-year-old computer. It plays offline; there is no network in it.

Best with a keyboard; on a phone, tap the screen to type.

• Changing sides: all six sides are in drive 1. When the game says INSERT SIDE B, click the stack badge on drive 1 (under the screen), pick HOMEBASE-B, then press space.
• After a SAVE, changing sides offers to save side A as a file: save it to keep your game, or cancel - the save stays in this tab until you close it.
• Type at a person's pace: keys typed or pasted faster than about three a second are partly lost.
• Click the screen before you play: browsers start sound only after a click or a key.

The disks

A · B · C · D · E · F · all six (zip) · SHA256SUMS.txt

A 64K Apple IIe with an 80-column card is enough; 128K and one drive is the usual setup, and the game reads only the drive it booted from. A one-disk hard-drive edition (an 800K ProDOS volume, by Jonathan Adar) boots from a Floppy Emu or a SmartPort card with no disk swaps at all. The release and its README: github.com/WhitneyDesignLabs/home-base.