Citadel was written with a different assembler to Triblox and Blip Blop – the Roybot assembler. I don’t remember exactly what its deficiencies were, but I certainly found HiSoft Devpac’s GENP351 to be a big improvement. Rather than having its own editor, with Roybot you entered code using Basic REM statements. To see this, open the disk below with an emulator (see the Triblox page for how to do this), enter +3 Basic and type load”citadel.lin” Then, once its loaded, type list to see the code.

I wasn’t able to find any design documents for Citadel – so I think it’s now beyond even me to figure it all out. In addition, citadel required various utilities for designing screens and lots of graphics data, none of which I have retrieved from the original disks. If you do want to have a go at assembling it, you’ll need to first download Roybot’s assembler from World of Spectrum or another archive site.

Citadel on the Web

You can find Citadel at World of Spectrum here, at Spectrum Computing here and you can play it online here. If you’d like some help with playing Citadel, there’s a map with some hints and infinite lives, energy and key pokes in The Tipshop.