DREADHOLLOW MANOR — Game Boy Color

The manor from the Atari 2600 original, rebuilt from scratch for the Game Boy Color: six rooms, three hidden relics a night — and a haunting that grows teeth.

You are an explorer trapped in Dreadhollow Manor. Each night, three relics (a chalice, a skull, and an amulet) are hidden somewhere in the six rooms — the Library, Foyer, Chapel, Cellar, Crypt, and Attic. Find all three and the manor releases you... to the next, darker night.

On the first night a single wraith hunts you. Every night after adds another, up to five. They fade into existence — that flicker is your warning — always somewhere away from you, then drift through the furniture toward you from every side. Weave between them, make for the next door, and banish them one at a time with your lantern bolt (+50). Relics score 100. One touch from a fully-formed wraith costs a life. Three lives. Endless nights.

Download & play

Grab dreadhollow-gbc-v12.gbc from the Releases page (or right here in the repo) and run it in any Game Boy Color emulator — or on real hardware with a flash cart. It's a 64KB MBC5 cartridge image. Also playable on itch.io: https://retroromrunner.itch.io/dreadhollow-gbc

Controls

• D-pad — walk
• A / B — fire a lantern bolt
• Start — start game / pause

The house

• Six hand-decorated rooms, each with its own color mood: fireplaces and sconces flicker, candles gutter, stained glass glows
• Animated explorer with a bobbing lantern; wraiths hover and flicker as they materialize
• Lightning storms over the Foyer, with thunder
• A four-channel soundtrack: music-box lead, bass, wave organ, and wind — plus bolt zaps, relic chimes, a banish sweep, and a death sting
• Palette-fade transitions, per-night gloom, endless escalating nights

Building

Requires GBDK-2020 (this project used 4.3.0):

./build.sh        # produces releases/dreadhollow-gbc-v12.gbc

gen_assets.py converts the string-art tiles, sprites, font, and room maps in its source into src/assets.h. QA harnesses live in qa/ (PyBoy-driven: full house tour, combat, relic, level-clear and game-over flows, frame-rate measurements per wraith count, and a 90,000-frame soak test).

Tech notes

Single C file (src/main.c) plus generated asset data. The game runs in CGB double-speed mode (cpu_fast()) — with five wraiths hunting at once the stock frame budget isn't enough, and on this hardware a missed vblank costs a whole extra frame. Wraith state lives in parallel plain arrays and all hot-loop math is 8/16-bit; SDCC's struct-array indexing and 32-bit division are frame-rate poison on gbz80. No battery save; high score lives in RAM for the session.