YOU ARE THE BRAIN, NOT THE GUN
You command an AI rookie with his own nerve, stress and trust meters. He can hesitate, panic, bolt, or refuse a bad order. He is a person, not a cursor.
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An original tactical-infiltration surveillance thriller for the Commodore Amiga 500 — written in 2026, booting from a real 880 KB floppy. You are not the agent: you are the brain in the van. Your hands in the dark are a rookie, and he is a person, not a cursor.
Chicago, 1988. You run field agent Wrobel — callsign Sparrow — across ten operations against the outfit that owns Cicero Avenue. Plant bugs, spend a finite reel of tape on a live wire console, photograph meets, tail suspects and protect civilians. And preserve chain of custody, because the scoreboard is not a score: it is an eight-count indictment.
Black Wire is an original surveillance and infiltration thriller for the Commodore Amiga 500. Chicago, 1988: an anonymous package arrives at the Bureau's field office — a single reel of two voices dividing a city. The voices are real. The case is nothing: no names, no dates, no chain of custody. You have to turn that tape into an indictment that survives a courtroom.
You are not the agent. You are the brain in the unmarked van: the camera feed, the wire console, the voice on the radio. Your hands in the dark are the rookie Wrobel — callsign Sparrow — and he is a person, not a cursor: he hesitates, panics, learns, and some nights disobeys. Where its late-80s ancestors counted points, Black Wire files charges.
Ten nights. Eight counts. A finite reel. The city hears everything you do, and the defense hears everything you fake. The line of copy the engine is proudest of is printed by its own Case Board: "THE STATE CAN SUSTAIN 2 COUNTS."
You can win the mission and lose the case. Evidence outranks kills.
You command an AI rookie with his own nerve, stress and trust meters. He can hesitate, panic, bolt, or refuse a bad order. He is a person, not a cursor.
Every planted bug is a channel. You monitor one at a time, and words become evidence only while the reel is rolling: six minutes of tape against a 27-minute night.
Dirty audio comes out ~redacted~. At the Meridian 5-40 you tune the band by hand and certify what was said… or fabricate evidence without knowing it, and the defense detonates it at the debrief.
Eight counts, each needing WHO + ACT + independent corroboration. Evidence from any night can corroborate another. One fabricated element poisons an entire count.
The van itself is a piece on the board. Transmit too much and a lookout makes you: choose between holding coverage or a 45-second relocation blackout while the world keeps moving.
Ten missions with routes, patrols, civilians and corrupt cops, every one machine-verified winnable. Four clearance levels, up to INTERNAL AFFAIRS ironman permadeath.
One 68000, three coprocessors and a finite reel. The Copper paints skies for free, the Blitter restores the whole screen in a single blit, and Paula whispers four channels of noir, fifty times a second.
Logic runs at 25 Hz under a 50 Hz PAL display, paced by a VERTB interrupt counting real vblanks: the game never slows when rendering gets heavy. Targets move whether you listen or not.
A full 4-plane screen restore is a single 1024-line blit; double-buffered copper lists paint scanline-band skies at zero cost. The mouse is a hardware sprite that becomes a spinning tape reel while the floppy grinds.
A real ProTracker MOD: the 'M.K.' signature sits at byte offset 1080, the same binary format Amiga musicians used in 1991, generated by script on every build. Calm/tension/alarm patterns self-loop and the engine jumps position as the night escalates, through Frank Wille's ptplayer 6.4 — public domain, 3,974 lines of 68000 assembly, in the repo.
No binary asset exists that cannot be regenerated from a script: 108 sprites, 11 portraits, 23 sound effects, two 64-tile tilesets and both songs come out of the code on every build. The mission compiler proves all ten operations winnable — reachability, route timing, tape budget — and all ten pass. 289 green self-checks and pixel-exact 16-colour host rendering.
The CIA chips: timers, floppy drive and the internal clock that keeps the 27-minute night running while you look away.
The whole campaign — ten operations, two dynamic scores, the entire SFX bank — boots from a single 880 KB floppy. No hard drive, no mandatory expansion.
The version the binary itself declares (BW_VERSION in include/version.h). Ten-operation campaign playable, 289 deterministic self-tests green, all ten missions machine-verified winnable by the solver. The repo's 880 KB .adf boots under cycle-exact emulation; the soak on a physical A500 is milestone M9′, still ahead.
Full creative audit: the game is retitled The Cicero Tapes and its signature systems land — wire console, finite tape, Wire Bench, van heat and the eight-count indictment.
The mission compiler now proves every operation winnable — reachability, route timing, tape-budget sufficiency — on every build. No impossible mission reaches the floppy.
Production begins with 1991 discipline: technical design doc first, vertical slice, hard memory and disk budgets, emulator builds and — as the closing milestone, M9′ — a soak on a physical A500.
No. It boots from a single 880 KB floppy on a stock 1 MB A500 (512K chip + 512K fast/trapdoor) — even `file` identifies the repo's .adf as a bootable AmigaDOS disk. Verified in cycle-exact emulation (FS-UAE / WinUAE); the soak on physical A500 hardware is the next milestone, not something we can promise yet.
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