Obake

Obake is a new game for the Tatung Einstein by Andrés, who publishes as Andrs Soft on itch.io. You are a ghost: eat every piece of fruit on the screen before the time runs out, and keep away from the enemy ghosts while you do it.

Play Obake in your browser in our Online Player, with nothing to install.

Where It Came From

Obake began as an MSX-BASIC game by Kazuhisa Yoneyama, published in MSX Magazine in 1986. Andrés rebuilt it in MSX-BASIC as Obake 2, and then wrote this version with CVBasic, a BASIC compiler for the MSX and other machines with the same video chip, the Einstein among them. On itch.io it is a paid download; Andrés has kindly let us host the Einstein version here for free.

Before release we tested it with him. On a TC-01 the game needed a change to cope with the machine having no frame interrupt; Andrés checked the fix we sent, made the same change in the other places that needed it, and added control from the keyboard.

Playing It

• Move with the cursor keys.
• F1 or BREAK pauses the game. In MAME those are F2 and Alt.
• Andrés notes that on a real Einstein the cursor keys may be awkward to play with.

Running It

Boot the disc and the game starts by itself, with no DOS needed. In MAME:

mame -rompath ~/roms einstein -flop1 ~/einstein/OBAKE.DSK -window

If you have not set MAME up yet, see emulating the Tatung Einstein. Or skip the setup and play it in the Online Player.

It is made for the TC-01. It also runs on the Einstein 256 in MAME, but faster: MAME runs the 256 at 60 Hz, and the game times itself on the TC-01's 50 Hz. Andrés is aware of it.

Files on the Disc

More of his games, for the MSX and other machines, are on his itch.io page.