Caverns of Zoarre, The Download (1984 Role playing Game)

Caverns of Zoarre is a dungeon crawl role playing game similar to Telengard. You may choose to be either a fighter or a sorcerer as you explore the multi-leveled caverns for gold and treasures. Your view of the maze like caverns is top down, and only the area near you is visible. Throughout the caverns are many different types of enemies you'll encounter; you can try to bargain or run to get out of trouble, or fight and use spells to defeat enemies. You can also optionally enable real time fighting instead of turn based. As you explore and (hopefully) win battles, you'll earn experience points and increase your skills. Good luck on your quest!

Some interesting info on this obscure Roguelike RPG from Balrog's page:

"Here's an obscure Telengard clone for the PC, possibly written before Telengard itself was ported to MS-DOS. Released in 1984. Telengard-like in most ways, a historical footnote.

[The author's response]: For what it's worth, this started out as a TRS-80 game, Dungeon of Mirandor, which never quite made it out. The TRS-80 market fell off a cliff about the time I finished it. Mirandor owed a lot, conceptually, to the DEC VAX 11/780 version of Telengard, which I'd played extensively around ?1983?. Zoarre was an expanded version, finished painfully at intervals over the course of a year or so. The "fight" handler was unduly tedious to program, and balked me for too long.

I wrote Zoarre using the IBM BASIC Compiler, a renamed version of one of Microsoft's early BASICs. The compiler went through DOS and BIOS services for I/O, and was so unspeakably slow at updating the screen that I had to write assembly language routines for direct screen writes. Plus, it didn't support the new DOS 2.0 features like subdirectories... albeit this wasn't a major issue on the typical floppy-only system of the time. Anyway, the assembly language routines eventually made it out as a separate product, AdvBas, which was far more successful than Zoarre. AdvBas later went commercial, and started me on my career in writing tools for programmers.

But, that's certainly a great deal more than you wanted to know. Anyway, it's nice to have a copy of Zoarre again.

How to run this game on modern Windows PC?

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