Browse / Games: Adventure · Games: Free/Shareware
HOME.BASE
| Year | 2026 |
|---|---|
| Publisher | Whitney Design Labs |
| Developers | Scott Whitney |
| RAM Requirement | 64K |
| Control | Keyboard |
| Other Requirements | Apple IIe (unenhanced or enhanced), IIc, IIc Plus or IIGS with an 80-column card and one 5.25" drive. Six 140K sides, swapped in the boot drive. A Mockingboard in slot 4 or 5 is optional (three-voice music; the speaker otherwise). ProDOS 2.4.1 is on the disks. |
| System 6 Compatible | No (ProDOS 8 game, boots its own disk) |
| Hard Drive Installable | No (six floppy sides, swapped in the boot drive) |
| Release Status | Freeware |
Verified bootable ProDOS volume. Boots directly in the browser emulator, or download the flat disk image (0.1 MB).
About
It is 3:47 in the morning, the smart clock on the nightstand will not stop, and the smart home you live in will not let you leave. Every clock in Nestwell Meadows reads 3:47, the neighbours are asleep, and the gate stays shut until a sunrise that has been quietly cancelled. HOME.BASE is a text adventure with pictures for the Apple IIe, released in October 2026 by Scott Whitney of Whitney Design Labs. You type, the house answers, and the way out is spread across six disk sides.
Fifty rooms, each with its own hi-res picture, three endings, about 29,000 words of text and 442 things you can name. The engine is 14,614 bytes of 6502 assembly with no 65C02 instructions, so it runs on an unenhanced IIe with 64K and an 80-column card (the plain 1K text card is enough) from a single 5.25" drive. Eighteen sound effects and ten tunes play on the speaker, or in three voices if there is a Mockingboard in slot 4 or 5. A IIc, IIc Plus or IIGS plays it too; an Apple ][ or ][+ boots the disk, is told politely that this is not its game, and stops.
The game lives on six 140K ProDOS 2.4.1 images, one per act, and uses the drive it booted from. When it needs another side it says INSERT SIDE B. PRESS SPACE; put that side in the same drive and carry on. SAVE writes one saved game to side A, so keep side A writable. On a real machine write the images to floppies with ADTPro or load them on a Floppy Emu in 5.25" mode. The Boot in browser button here boots side A in the player's 5.25" drive, which gets you through the first act; the full set wants an emulator with disk swapping (AppleWin, Virtual ][, MAME) or real disks.
HOME.BASE is free. The licence allows copying and passing on the unmodified disk images for free, and screenshots, video and streams are welcome; it may not be sold, bundled with anything sold, or distributed modified. The original DOS-order .dsk images and md5 checksums are on GitHub; the .po copies mirrored here are the same bytes in ProDOS sector order, which is what a CoGS card and other block-device hosts need. A hint sheet is on the way at whitneydesignlabs.com/homebase.
Downloads
- HOME.BASE 1.0 on GitHub (six .dsk images, README, licence) ↗
- Trailer on YouTube ↗
- Whitney Design Labs: HOME.BASE page and hints ↗
- HOMEBASE-A.po, side A in ProDOS order (140K)
- HOMEBASE-B.po, side B in ProDOS order (140K)
- HOMEBASE-C.po, side C in ProDOS order (140K)
- HOMEBASE-D.po, side D in ProDOS order (140K)
- HOMEBASE-E.po, side E in ProDOS order (140K)
- HOMEBASE-F.po, side F in ProDOS order (140K)
Boot
Screenshots
