The Another World (Out of This World) engine, ported to TurboPython: the bytecode VM, the resource loader with its ByteKiller decompressor, and the polygon rasterizer. The picture is drawn in the terminal with block glyphs and 24-bit color, and the game is played with the keyboard.
The DOS release in Ghostty, drawn with octant glyphs (Ghostty's default; tpy aw.py data/pc).
You can get the game on GOG: Another World 20th Anniversary Edition, which also includes the Amiga version. No game data is included here; if you play it with this port, please buy it and support its makers.
The game reads three releases; point DIR on the command line at one of
them:
- 20th Anniversary Edition (GOG): the install directory, or its
game/directory. The game runs its original 320x200 pictures and the English text of the edition, and its original sound or, with--remastered-audio, its remastered one; the HD pictures are not used. - DOS: the directory with
MEMLIST.BINandBANK01toBANK0D. - Amiga, which the GOG edition includes as a zip of two floppy images:
the directory with the two
.adffiles from the unzipped archive, or with thebankNNfiles on them.
The game runs on TurboPython, which compiles it to C++ on the first run. It needs TurboPython 0.7, which is not released yet; until it is, TurboPython is installed from its repository:
uv tool install git+https://github.com/trozen/tpy-lang # TurboPython's master
tpy aw.py DIR # DIR holds the game dataThe released TurboPython 0.6.2 (uv tool install tpy-lang) runs the game as
of the tpy-0.6.2 tag (git checkout tpy-0.6.2), without sound and music.
In Ghostty the game draws its sharpest picture (-8) by default; for other
terminals see Terminal. The keys are below; tpy aw.py
without arguments prints them with all the options.
| Key | Action |
|---|---|
| left, right | walk; run with space held |
| up | jump |
| down | crouch |
| space, enter | action: kick, shoot, or run with an arrow; skips the intro |
| c | the password screen, to start at a checkpoint by its code |
| p | pause (the 20th Anniversary Edition's music recordings play on) |
| letters, backspace, enter | type a code on the password screen, and check it |
| Ctrl-C | quit, printing the code of the checkpoint reached in a level |
For the best experience, run the game in Ghostty.
Use a terminal with the kitty keyboard protocol: Ghostty, kitty, WezTerm, foot or Alacritty. Only such terminals report key releases, and the game needs to know how long a key is held; in others, such as GNOME Terminal, a key counts as held while it repeats, so a tap lasts about half a second. The terminal also needs 24-bit color; the picture is scaled to fit the window.
Sound goes to the sound server through pw-play (PipeWire), paplay
(PulseAudio), aplay (ALSA) or SoX's play, the first of them that
works; without one the game plays silently and says so when it quits. On
macOS that is play: brew install sox.
Use -8 where the terminal can show it: it draws 2x4 pixels a cell, the
sharpest picture, with octant characters (Unicode 16) that most fonts lack;
-6 needs sextants (Unicode 13). Ghostty draws these characters itself,
whatever the font. Without an option, the game uses -8 in Ghostty, which
it detects, and -2, which works with any font, elsewhere.
On macOS, play in Ghostty (brew install --cask ghostty). The fonts macOS
ships lack octants, and with one installed that has them, iTerm2 still
draws -8 with stripes between the rows.
The image is scaled to fit the terminal and centered. The mode picks how
many pixels one terminal cell shows: -2, -4, -6 and -8 by that count,
or -r (--render) by name. Without one, the game uses -8 in Ghostty,
which it detects, and -2 elsewhere.
| Option | Pixels per cell | Notes |
|---|---|---|
-2, -r half |
1x2 | half blocks; every cell exact; the default outside Ghostty |
-4, -r quad |
2x2 | quadrants |
-6, -r sextant |
2x3 | needs sextants (Unicode 13) in the font, or Ghostty |
-8, -r octant |
2x4 | needs octants (Unicode 16) in the font, or Ghostty; the default in Ghostty |
-r braille |
2x4 | dots; one-color cells are drawn solid |
A cell shows two colors; a cell with more gets the pair that represents its pixels best. The frame is first reduced to the grid the terminal fits, keeping the most common color of each block of pixels.
- A smooth mode. The game runs at about 10 frames a second, and its animation is hand-drawn key poses. Frames in between could glide moved shapes and morph one pose into the next, shown during the wait the original already has before each frame, so they would add no delay. Going further, the scripts could run at 30 steps a second, every third step kept equal to the original's.
- Save states.
- A search of the bytecode for code and text the game never reaches.
How the engine is checked, its headless runs and its source layout: docs/DEVELOPMENT.md.
TPy runs the benchmark 25x faster than CPython 3.14, 2.5x faster than PyPy and 1.5x faster than Shedskin.
The engine runs under TPy and under other ways of running the same Python source. A batch is three scenes of the DOS release, 1460 timed frames. Each runner runs 5 processes of 20 batches; a process counts the median of its batches 11-20, and the table gives the median over the processes. All runs are on one pinned CPU of a Ryzen 9 5950X, and every run's end-state digests are checked.
| Runner | ms per batch | vs TPy (slower) |
|---|---|---|
| TPy | 34.5 ms | 1.0x |
| CPython 3.14 | 870 ms | 25.2x |
| PyPy 3.11 | 93.6 ms | 2.7x |
| PyPy 3.12 | 87.2 ms | 2.5x |
| Nuitka (CPython 3.14) | 1280 ms | 37.1x |
| mypyc (CPython 3.14) | 202 ms | 5.9x |
| Shedskin -O3 | 52.6 ms | 1.5x |
The DOS release's files are not part of the GOG edition; docs/DEVELOPMENT.md lists them with their sizes and SHA-256. The runners, the full results, how they are reproduced, and the caveats: docs/DEVELOPMENT.md, Benchmark.
- Another-World-Bytecode-Interpreter by Fabien Sanglard, the interpreter this engine is ported from, and the reference its DOS and Amiga frames are checked against. His "Another World" source code review walks through how it works.
- Gregory Montoir's
raw, the reverse engineering of the DOS executable that Sanglard's interpreter is based on. - rawgl, Montoir's later engine: the Amiga release's resource list and start values, the 20th Anniversary Edition's files, string ids and fallback strings, how sound and music are played, and the reference for the 20th Anniversary Edition's frames.
- Eric Chahi's official Another World site, on how he made the game.
GPL-2.0, see LICENSE, as the engines it is ported from. Another World is
by Eric Chahi.