It came to me like a…Magic Bolt. It was probably a combination of seeing that somebody had ported inky to the Xteink e-readers and the absolute crazy scenes over in the world of synths, where it feels like the M-VAVE FM-1 is getting a new firmware every 33 minutes. Eventually, I do want to create text adventures for Maeryn, but that might be a year or two off just yet. But in the meantime, I wanted to build something fun…and then it hit me.

So, here’s Misrule, a reimplementation of the mighty Chaos for the Xteink X4 Classic.

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It builds on top of FreeInk, so in theory it is portable to a whole bunch of other e-readers, but I’ve only tested it physically on the X4 Classic. And yes, as you can tell from the repo, it was a Saturday afternoon adventure with Claude, where we went off and looked at disassemblies of the original Spectrum version, came up with new sprites, and even tightened up the game a little. It now has better stats tracking, the ability to save and resume a battle…and there are a few extra changes to the underlying game rules and how they worked in the original. Firstly: the TURMOIL spell will no longer crash the game. Hurrah! I also brought the unused Troll spell back into the mix, and perhaps the most controversial change: you can now change your mind after selecting a unit and come back to them later on in your turn. Which probably alters the game a little, but it seemed a good idea to be a little more lenient given that the controls aren’t quite as nice as using a full keyboard.

However, if you are affronted by these blasphemous changes to the original Gollopness, you can turn most of them off in the options menu.

(also, after I took the pics, I realized it probably would be a good idea to have a battery indicator present, so I added that as well)

Anyway, a productive afternoon. There’s probably fewer than 100 people in the world clamouring for a dedicated Chaos handheld, and I think it’s in these situations that Claude/Codex/whatever harness really shine. Have you ever just wanted something some so esoteric and personal that nobody else is going to build? Congratulations, you can now do it in a day. Or a few days, spread out over some weeks and months…¹