Kareltima III: The Self-Beating Machine 

Home ► Programming ► Kareltima III ►

Kareltima for X11, Unix, Linux, Windows, MacOS, and BeOS!

I have finally finished porting Kareltima to modern operating systems. I've used Simple Directmedia Layer to do the dirty work, which allowed me to emulate a PC 80x25 text mode on a variety of very different framebuffers.

The game is available as source, Debian and RPM packages. It's been successfully compiled on GNU/Linux (x86 and SPARC). Other platforms are untested ― use at your own risk. Actually, no matter what platform you run it on, you play Kareltima at your own risk.

Kareltima III ― The Self-Beating Machine

Kareltima is a joke on many levels. It's a DOS program ― a joke in and of itself. The name is a reference to Alexandros Karelas, who perpetrated the first two Kareltimas in Turbo Pascal. It's a spoof of Richard Garriot's Ultima games (of which both Alexandros and I have been long-time fans). It's a Roguelike game, which means it uses text and block graphics instead of raster graphics. It features inside jokes and various friends, including cameo appearances by Andreas Gazis (aka Andy the Malack and Armadillo Gazeer) and Marina Zannara (aka Silwen Thorontari).

Kareltima I (Attack of the Mutant Sjutvynheims) and Kareltima II: the Ugly Shopkeeper are available, but in binary form only. Alexandros Karelas wrote these two sometime in mid-1992. Kareltima III: The Self-Beating Machine was written by moi, although I used some dialogues (and many of the characters) from the previous two games. It's more colourful than the previous two games, but still follows the same general design principles.

The game is rather silly and has daft writing. I think it's important because it's a cute little hack. I believe it's the one and only game I've written for the Daft ‘Operating System’.

You can get Kareltima III: The Self-Beating Machine (Pascal source and .EXE binary) right here, in ZIP format (95 kbytes). The game is released under the terms of the GNU General Public License.

The historic Kareltima II: The Ugly Shopkeeper is also available (18 kbytes), though without source.

And, of course, the very original Spawn of Utter Boredom, Kareltima I: The Attack of the Mutant Sjutvynheims is finally available online (11 kbytes). Again without source.

Disclaimer: Kareltimas tend to have offensive language and concepts that you will certainly find distasteful. You really shouldn't have downloaded them.