When I was young, back in high school, I remember spending lots of time playing the Neuromancer video game. I was a big fan of the book, and all the other books by William Gibson, so when I found out there was a video game in the same universe, I was excited. I think I bought the game – one of the few – based on saved up money from mowing lawns around the neighborhood.

I recently watched a bunch of videos of a Longplay on Commodore 64, but I knew the game had both Apple ][GS and Amiga versions. I thought it would be fun to emulate one of those versions and play through it.

This, of course, means going through all the pain that emulation entails.

First, the fruits of my labor: screenshots from the Amiga and GS versions of the game in the same locations. I’ll sprinkle them throughout this blog post.

Apple ][ GS Emulation

I had the most success early with Apple ][GS emulation. I picked up the disk image (we’ll say for the sake of argument that I found my legally purchased copy from back in the day – maybe I bought it for Jon or something, ok?)

I used KEGS, Kent’s Emulated GS, and spent some time looking for the Apple ][GS bios. It wasn’t too hard, but I don’t recall where I found it. I think I probably dumped an image back in the day from Jon’s GS for the sake of argument. Once I had the BIOS in place, it wasn’t hard at all to point the emulator to my disk image. You just need to open the control panel (F4 and there is a menu interface from there), set up the bios, and assign the disk image to s5d1. You can freely re-size the window, and the scaling worked fine. I never found a way to enable scanlines.

I did have to move the directory I stored KEGS in to the f:/ root drive. It didn’t like being in my Documents or Downloads folder. The other things to be careful with:

Pressing alt, like to alt-tab, for some reason makes the mouse button always be held down. Press alt again (no tab, while in window) to toggle back to a working mouse.

That took me a long, long, time to figure out. The second mouse button toggles through emulator speeds, which is nice. I haven’t had any problems with it otherwise.

Amiga Emulation

I initially found a nice package with WHDLoad set up and all packaged together. It was nice. Unfortunately, it was running on Kickstart 3.1, the newest Kickstart released for actual hardware. Neuromancer came out before that, and I had fatal crashes that made the game unplayable that way.

My friend Eric, who had an Amiga back in the day, and for the purposes of this article, game me his legal copy of the game and dumps or the Kickstart ROMs from his actual hardware, let me know that Neuromancer needs to run on the 1.3 Kickstart ROMs.

I decided to use the FS-UAE emulator and it’s loader since that emulator has a linux port, and one thing I am interested in doing is getting this running on my Steam Deck.

After downloading FS-UAE-Launcher and unpacking it, to run it you need to navigate to FS-UAE-Launcher/Windows/x86-64/fs-uae-launcher.exe. Unfortunately, when I did that, I got an error: “Failed to execute script” and the stack trace mentioned that it “failed to retrieve windows path”. I played around with that for a bit, but it looked a lot like problems I’ve seen in the past when your home directory doesn’t live on C:. Moving the folder over to C:/ root, and then things worked fine. It sounds like a simple solution, and it is, but I don’t want to skip over just how frustrating this was: it was very frustrating.

Once I was able to get the loader working, it was a simple matter of setting the path to the BIOS, and then setting the path to the disk. Things worked well!

I wanted to enable scanlines, since I think that looks nice. I didn’t see a front-end option for that in FS-UAE-Launcher, but I poked around a bit, and found that adding

scanlines = 1

into the config file worked. The config files are stored in My Documents/FS-UAE/Configurations/config-name.fs-uae if you saved out the configuration in the loader as “config-name”.

Walking on the Amiga is very slow, but I found if you press Control-W it turns on Warp mode and then everything is very fast. You need to toggle it again when you want to talk or do anything though, since keypresses are way too fast otherwise.

Comparison

Both of the systems work well. I like the control on the Apple ][GS a bit better, you can do more with the keyboard. The Amiga makes you cycle the talk options with the mouse, and doesn’t accept arrow key input. The Amiga version lets you know when it is accessing the disk with simulated disk drive noise, which is nice. The Apple ][GS version is silent, though you can enable the status bars and it will show a disk access indicator.

I think the Amiga graphics look a bit better. I don’t know if it is the resolution or what – the Apple ][GS is running in I think the 640×200 mode with 16 colors per line from a palette of 4096. The Amiga is probably the same, but there is a chance it is running in 640×400 with 16 colors. I can’t really tell, and I don’t know enough about the emulators to be able to find out what they are rendering at. So I’ll likely play the Amiga version.

The sound on both systems is great. They start with the same song on the title screen. The Commodore 64 version would periodically play some music, but both the Amiga and Apple versions have been pretty quiet. I haven’t played much, maybe half an hour or so really.

Otherwise, I don’t have too much to add. I remember making it to Cyber Space and spending a lot of time trying to upgrade my software on various BBSs, looking for new commlink codes, and fighting ICE, but don’t really remember much of anything else.

I know I didn’t complete the game. Or if I did, I remember almost nothing about it.

This time around, I started taking notes in Emacs (org-mode) – which itself very much fits the theme and look of the technology depicted in the game. I would like to record a run that I narrate / comment on to upload to YouTube. The Long Play I was watching ended abruptly. I think it would be fun to do an Apple ][GS play and one on Amiga, but I don’t really have the time. I’m not sure I’ll actually play the game even since it is almost more fun trying to get it to run than actually playing it.