LOAD-IN RUN
Five load-ins. One night. Reach each stage door before the CALL clock runs out.
Loading the cartridge (128 KiB)…
Saved states last for this visit. Sound starts with Power.
LOAD-IN RUN needs a keyboard or a game controller. On a phone or tablet without one you can read about the game here, but you can’t play it yet.
1
The cartridge · in the fiction
Avenell Playhouse's night road racer. A theatre-lighting crew's van drives five dark roads to five stage doors before the half-hour call, and the road itself is drawn by light: high beams show more of it but dazzle oncoming drivers, fog swallows it, and the last leg ends under a lit theatre marquee.
- Developer
- Avenell Playhouse
- Year
- 1990
- Genre
- Racing
- Technique
- flying
2
Controls
| Cyclorama pad | Keyboard | Game controller |
|---|---|---|
| D-pad | Arrow keys | D-pad or left stick |
| A | Z | Bottom face button |
| B | X | Right face button |
| C | C | Left or top face button |
| START | Enter | Start |
| Save state | F5 | — |
| Load state | F8 | — |
| Power off | Escape | — |
Saved states are kept for this visit only. Controllers use the standard layout (Xbox, PlayStation and most USB or Bluetooth pads). Press any button on the controller after powering on so the browser notices it.
3
How to play
After the Curtain Up splash, press Start (keyboard Enter, or a controller's Start button) on the title screen and on the how-to-play page. Steer with the D-pad (arrow keys, or a controller's d-pad or left stick). A (keyboard Z) is the gas and B (keyboard X) is the brake; hold C (keyboard C) for HIGH BEAM and let go for LOW BEAM. Start pauses. Drive five night legs (HEDGEROW LANE, MILLPOND ROAD, THE ESPLANADE, QUARRY PASS and MARQUEE ROAD) to their stage doors before the CALL clock, the countdown at the top left, runs out; the waypoint lamp halfway along each leg adds time, and every second left at a stage door scores. Slow sedans and vans hold the right lane and oncoming cars come down the left: pass the slow ones (a run of passes scores 100, 200, 400, 800) and dodge crates and roadworks; hitting anything costs speed, and speed is time. High beam shows the road farther and lights vehicles and crates sooner, but if you leave it on while an oncoming car is close it flashes back and dazzles you for about a second: the screen washes out and you cannot steer, so dip it for oncoming lights. Fog hides the road and shortens the beam. Bends push the van outward, so lift off before a sharp one. Running out of clock costs one of three lives and restarts the leg; with none left it is game over. Reach the last stage door under the theatre marquee to win.
What is running
When you power on, your browser runs an emulator of the Cyclorama: its CPU, its video chip with the light field, and its Cue sound chip, at the real frame rate. The cartridge is the same 128 KiB ROM the project builds and tests, byte for byte.
load-in-run · 131,072 bytes · SHA-256 2e07fa996640d725a1c4127c6f777e61e3d6eea4d970c2445bb7d647c9a84522
No account and no cookies. Apart from its own files, the page loads one script: Cloudflare Web Analytics, which counts visits and page speed without cookies. The hardware is documented in full: read the HED-0041 hardware and programmer’s manual and the SCRIM language specification. Or go back to the Cyclorama.