A step-by-step ordering from Rogueima I MVP-4 toward something with NetWhack's shape. Each step is meant to be finishable on its own, and to leave the game playable when it lands.

For the reasoning behind the grouping, see the roadmap in programs/rogueima/ROADMAP.md. This page is the working list.

move_left, move_down, move_up and move_right are four near-identical routines, each with its own edge check, its own is_walkable call and its own store. Replace them with a single

try_move  ; CL = dx, DL = dy

that computes the destination, bounds-checks it, asks is_walkable and commits. The four existing directions become four callers.

Nothing changes on screen. This is the step that makes the next one free, and it removes three copies of a bug surface.

Add Y U B N for the diagonals, so the vi keys form the usual 3×3. With try_move in place each is two instructions and a call. Keep the arrow keys ($80-$83) mapped to the orthogonals, and consider the numpad digits as NetWhack uses them.

Four-way movement is the most noticeable difference between Rogueima and any other roguelike. This is an afternoon.

Walking was not the only thing that asked for a direction. open_door and do_talk each had their own copy of the key list, so after Step 2 you could walk diagonally but not open or talk diagonally — the same bug in two more places, which is exactly what Step 1 was meant to prevent.

The fix is the Step 1 move again, one level up. Four routines now do the work for all three prompts:

get_dir_key   ; read a key, fold it to upper case
decode_dir    ; AL -> CL = dx, DL = dy, ELM -> the name, carry = valid
dir_target    ; player + CL/DL -> X, Y, carry = on the map
print_dir     ; "  OPEN " + "NORTHEAST" + newline, preserving C and D

decode_dir is now the only place in the game that knows what a movement key is. Adding a fifth prompt that wants a direction — fire, throw, kick — costs two calls.

Two details worth keeping in mind:

• ELM and FLD are paired registers (EL:M, FL:D), so

FLD cannot hold a pointer while D holds a delta. print_dir

  takes its prefix in ''GLK'' and consumes it before any call.
* ''dir_target'' bounds-checks, which ''open_door'' and ''do_talk'' never
  did. Reading a glyph one step off the edge of the map used to read
  whatever followed the map data.

“ OPEN DOOR ” plus “NORTHEAST” is 21 characters and the message window is 19 wide, so the prefix lost the word the prompt above it already supplies.

Today the player moves and the world does not answer. Establish the order: the player acts, every monster acts, the clock advances. The T: counter in the status panel already exists — make a successful action advance it, and give move_mon its turn immediately after.

Everything from here assumes monsters get a turn when you take one.

move_mon was being called from inside draw_map, so monsters moved once per redraw, before the player's key had even been read. It is a call in the loop now, and the loop is the whole of the ordering:

main_loop:
    CALL @draw_map
    CALL @get_input         ; the player acts
    JNC @main_loop          ; ...or did not: redraw and ask again
    CALL @move_mon          ; now the world answers
    CALL @inc_game_time     ; and the clock moves
    JMP @main_loop

Every command routine answers the same question in the carry flag:

^ carry ^ meaning ^
| set   | the player spent a turn |
| clear | nothing happened |

get_input tail-jumps to those routines, so their carry is its carry and no dispatch code has to know which commands cost time. Walking into a wall, naming a direction with no door in it, and pressing an unknown key are all free — the world does not get to answer a non-move. M and G conjure things out of nothing, so they are free too; they are debug commands.

Giving monsters a real turn meant there had to be monsters, and there never had been:

• init_objects said “Write id = 0 for this record” but the

instruction was STB [ELM + I], and B was never zeroed. Every slot

  was born with a non-zero ID — that is, "in use" — so the ''SCANQUE'' in
  ''spawn_monster'' and ''create_gold'' never found a free one. **''M'' and
  ''G'' had been failing silently.** Whether this bit depended on what the
  title screen happened to leave in ''B''.
* ''MOD B, KL'' mixes a 16-bit destination with an 8-bit source. ''MOD''
  takes its width from the destination, so this read ''REGS[30]'' — past the
  end of the 16-bit register file — and ''B'' came back unreduced. Monsters
  and gold were being placed at coordinates like (56242, 15977), off the map
  and out of reach. Both spawners widen the dimensions into ''I'' and ''J''
  first now.
* ''move_mon'' still had a ''SED''/''CLD'' pair bracketing its commit —
  leftover CPU-trace instrumentation, harmless only for as long as no
  monster ever moved.

The assembler rejects mismatched widths for MOV but accepts them for arithmetic, and the CPU then indexes the register file with the raw encoding. MOD B, KL is not a typo the tools will catch. Worth a width check on the arithmetic path.

Numpad 5 and . both reach move_wait, which is now the one move that is nothing but time: it returns carry set without touching PX/PY, so the monsters get their turn and the clock advances. That makes it the way to watch monster behaviour without moving, which is what makes the next several steps testable.

map1_data is literal text — 40 lines of .bytes “####…”. That is fine for one static level and blocks everything else. Introduce a tile array with one byte of glyph and one byte of flags per cell, and a loader that expands the text into it when a level is entered.

Keep the text as the source format. It is readable, it diffs well, and hand-authored levels stay easy to write.

This is the pivotal step. Stairs, generated levels and line of sight all need per-tile storage, and doing any of them first means doing them twice.

map1_id, map1_name, map1_up, map1_down and map1_dim already exist — the structure anticipates several levels and the stair coordinates are already declared. Generalise them into an array of level descriptors: id, name, dimensions, up and down stair positions, and a pointer to the tile data. One entry to begin with.

< and >. Entering a staircase switches the active level descriptor and places the player on the matching stair of the destination. The coordinates are already in the data.

Hand-authored, in the same text format. Proves the machinery of Steps 5-7 before any of it depends on a generator.

Rooms and corridors, seeded from the RNG so a level is reproducible from its depth and seed. Appendix III of Writing Games in Assembly Language sketches this already, and NetWhack's DungeonMaker.java (633 lines) is the working reference.

With 16 MB there is no reason to discard a level once made: an 80×40 map is 3,200 bytes, so a 26-level dungeon fits inside a single bank. Levels can simply persist.

Add the two flags to the tile structure from Step 5, and teach the renderer three states: visible (bright), seen but not visible (dim), unseen (blank). Then mark every tile seen and visible, so nothing changes on screen yet.

Installing the machinery separately from switching it on keeps the next step small and makes a regression obvious.

Each turn, clear visible, then walk a line from the player to every tile within a radius, stopping at anything opaque; mark what is reached visible and seen. NetWhack's Level.visline() and makevis() are the reference.

Integer Bresenham over tiles — not the PPU's line primitive, which draws pixels.

This is the step that changes how the game feels more than any other on this list. A lit corridor ahead and a remembered room behind is the difference between a map and a dungeon.

i to list, d to drop, and extend the existing ‚ pickup. Carried items are a queue, and the machine has INSQUE/REMQUE/SCANQUE for exactly this — obj.sda already uses them for objects lying in the world.

A shared header — kind, glyph, name pointer, weight — with a per-class payload after it. Weapons and armour first, because combat.sda already exists and will show the difference immediately.

w, W, T. Equipment slots feed the existing combat resolution: weapon damage, armour class.

Food, potions, scrolls, and a small effect dispatch table they trigger. NetWhack keeps 12 of each and an Effect class; a dozen effects is plenty to start.

A food clock, and e to eat. This is what turns wandering into a game: it is the reason to go down rather than explore forever.

HP returning slowly with time, resting to pass turns safely, and a proper death — tombstone, final score, and a return to the prompt rather than a hang.

Replace hardcoded monsters with data: glyph, name, hit points, damage, speed, depth range, behaviour flags. NetWhack's MobData has 60 entries; a dozen would already transform the game. Spawn by depth so descending means something.

NetWhack's PathMap.java is a Dijkstra map — flood the distance-to-player across walkable tiles, and every monster moves downhill. It replaces “step toward the player” with something that goes around corners, and it costs one pass per turn rather than one search per monster.

S to save and resume. The file services already exist behind INT $15. A high score table after that.

Steps 2, 7 and 11 — eight-way movement, stairs to a second level, and line of sight. That is the difference between a demo and a roguelike, and none of the three is large.