The Black Onyx 
NEC PC-9801
(c)1984 B.P.S. (Bullet-Proof Software)
English Translation
by LordKarnov42

-The Game------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------You Lost It-
The Black Onyx. What can I say? It's one of my favorite dungeon crawlers from the 1980's. The Black Onyx is generally
considered to be one of the first Japanese RPGs, alongside Koei's Dungeon and Nihon Falcom's Paorama-tou and Dragon Slayer.
Released in 1984, it predates The Bard's Tale by about a year, which as far as I know makes it the first FPRPG that has
a non-menu-based city that you explore.

You start out in said city, create your characters [up to five], choose a crude [but awesome] sprite representation of
your characters, go equip them, and delve into the dungeons beneath the city in search of the Black Onyx.

The gameplay cuts straight to the core of dungeon crawlers. There is no magic, no ranged weapons [or concept of range],
it's just your characters, their equipment, and a dungeon filled with things that just don't like you. One of the more
unique gameplay features for the time is conversation. If your party isn't full, you can speak to random townspeople
that you encounter in town and in the dungeons and recruit them into your party [or demand their money!] The thing that
gives the game its most charm however is the sprite representation of your characters. At the beginning they are all
wearing rags and equipped with a club. As you get money from fighting enemies, and you purchase better equipment, it
actually appears on your character sprites. This is 1984. I can't think of many games before 2004 that bothered with
doing anything like this.

The game was popular enough to spawn a sequel also on the PC-8801mkIISR called "The Fire Crystal" which has the same basic
gameplay, but instead of going through the dungeons beneath the town, you explore the catacombs in the town's temple. It
also added a magic system. A second sequel was planned, and judging by the existence of screenshots, developed at least a
little, that took place in the wilderness outside of the town, and another was going to focus around the town's Arena.

Aside from being ported to most of the 8bit Japanese PCs of the era, it was also remade and expanded on the Nintendo
Family Computer under the title of Super Black Onyx, and ported to the Nintendo Game Boy Color under the original title.
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-The Hackery---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Totally, I spent two days on this. It took a little longer than the PC88 version for some reason. It was coded in BASIC
so the source code was right there on the disk for me to mess with. I'm tired of writing this readme. The end.
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-The Instructions----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
The NEC PC-9801 version is a bit more primitive than the NEC PC8801mkIISR version.
First of all, there are no sounds in the game other than the occasional PC Speaker bleep, and second of all it only
utilizes a single disk drive. The biggest problem with this is that if you save a character to the Game Disk, it overwrites
the exact portion of the game's code that automatically boots the game on startup. So don't save your characters to the
Game Disk. [Though, if you do, you simply have to type LOAD"START" then RUN to boot the game, but who knows when characters
will start overwriting more critical portions of code. I've included a Character Disk that is a copy of the Game Disk
complete with translation, so even if you forget to swap back to the game disk you should be fine [unless that whole
overwriting critical portions of code thing happens]. Have fun.
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-The Credits---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Henk Rogers		Concieved the game.
B.P.S.			Created the game.
LordKarnov42	Translated the game.
Ashura			Gave me immense technical support help.
Ben				Has an awesome forum at http://fullmotionvideo.free.fr/.
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