TINSEL AND TALLOW
Climb the Lighting Grid, defeat the Master Dimmer, and bring the house lights up.
Loading the cartridge (512 KiB)…
Saved states last for this visit. Sound starts with Power.
TINSEL AND TALLOW 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 first Deep-board role-playing game, with a battery save. Tibb, an apprentice stage electrician, carries the last working lamp through a country shaped like a theatre: the lamp is sight, magic and fuel, monsters come out where the light fails, and the battle chance on every step is read from the shade of the light field itself.
- Developer
- Avenell Playhouse
- Year
- 1991
- Genre
- Role-playing
- 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 A (keyboard Z) or Start (Enter) on the title screen: NEW GAME begins, and CONTINUE appears once you have saved. Walk with the D-pad (arrow keys); hold B (X) to run. A talks to the person you face, and Start opens the camp menu: LIGHT (cast RELAMP), ITEM, STATUS and SUSPEND, which saves and starts the console over so CONTINUE can bring the game back. Step onto a lamp post to rest and save (a town lamp post costs 8 gold, a dungeon one is free); step onto a shop counter to buy. Your work lamp is your eyes, your magic and your fuel: its glow drains as you walk through dungeons, light spells and battles spend it, and at zero you walk blind. Monsters come out where it is dark: the chance of a fight on each step is read from the light at your feet, so stand near a lamp post or a wall torch to be safe and expect fights at night and in dark corridors. In battle choose FIGHT, LIGHT (SPOT hurts one enemy, SIDEWASH and BLINDER hit them all, RELAMP heals), ITEM (liniment heals, oil flask refuels the lamp) or RUN, with the D-pad and A; B goes back. Beat the three keepers (in the Cellarage, the Fly Loft and the Orchestra Pit), take the keys they leave, climb the Lighting Grid and defeat the Master Dimmer to bring the house lights up. If you fall you wake at the last town's lamp post with half your gold.
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 512 KiB ROM the project builds and tests, byte for byte.
tinsel-and-tallow · 524,288 bytes · SHA-256 9b1eb71b4ef129e4d8db468a3da021103798e503b7ee2f1f2cc952429d7fd35a
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.