Demo hosted at https://emeraldhunt.ianleeder.com/.
Emerald Hunt is a game I played a LOT in the 90s.
When I started this project back in 2014, I could not find a copy of the original game. Out of nostalgia, and a desire to challenge myself, I decided to recreate the game from memory in JavaScript. I found some online images of a Palm PC version of the game (!), and got to work.
Eventually during development, I found a copy of the game, and uploaded it to Abandonia. It runs perfectly well in DosBox, and this helped a lot with development.
This project was for personal pleasure, and to practice my JavaScript coding. To that end, I decided not to use any additional libraries (eg jQuery) and use native JavaScript for everything.
During the original development (2014), the game got to the point where it was more fun to play than to develop, and development stopped.
Sometime around 2019 I learnt about asynchronous programming, and that JavaScript could support some OOP design styles, so I started a rewrite. Between 2019-2020 I got a reasonable chunk done before development stalled again.
I finally picked it up again in 2022, and "finished" it off.
The game reads the sprite data directly from the original resource files (resources\objects.dat). The original game also has a level editor (build.exe) and a sprite editor (buildobj.exe), so new sprites can be generated and used.
Since the original game used a PC speaker (this was pre-SoundBlaster days), I figured I could reproduce the same crappy audio.
It would have been easy to record the .wav files, and replay them. Too easy. So instead I recorded the DosBox audio, analysed it in Audacity, worked out the square-wave frequencies and timespans, and recreated them using JavaScript AudioContext APIs.