The Armageddon Man: play

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The options panel: F3 for the joystick, F1 for the keyboard.
Joystick: ← → ↑ ↓ move the cursor, Space fires.

The game's own screen, drawn from the port's memory each frame as the video chip would draw it, at the C64's own pace. Every command is an icon or a menu row: move the cursor onto it and fire. The clock runs only on the main screen, so a window left open holds the year still.

01 · Strategy

Rules of thumb

No sure way through the year, but these follow from how the game decides what happens.

Only the survivors count. At the end of week 52 the rating is 100, less six or seven points for every country destroyed. Confidence, resources and the weekly communiques do not enter it, so spend them freely to keep everyone alive.
Watch Libya first. Its hostilities start out wrapping round to the top of the scale against about seven countries a game, and its only rung above 234 is the Total Missile Attack, so it is often the first to fire, sometimes inside the first week.
Park the U.N.N. Force where the trouble is. A Total Missile Attack from or on the country the force sits in is stopped, and that country obeys your letters whatever it thinks of you. Moving it takes up to three weeks, so move it early.
Never answer Neutral to terror. For an assassinated diplomat, a mobbed embassy, a car bomb or aid to a fanatical opposition, Neutral recalls you for incompetence half the time, and the game is over.
Give in to demands. When a country demands food or technology from another, Yes hands it over and cancels the event the demand came before. No lets that event happen, and Ignore makes both sides as hostile as the next harsher event and runs that one instead.
Never agree to be replaced. When a country writes that it has asked the U.N.N. Council to replace you, Agree ends the game on the spot. Ignore costs nothing, Disagree a little of that country's confidence.
Put the SDI satellites over the likely targets. Each one catches a missile flying under it by a 1 in 4 chance every frame. Israel falls after 16 hits, Japan after 32 and Pakistan after 48, against 240 or more for China and the Eastern Block.
Mind the radiation. Every hit that does not finish a country raises it by a 1 in 4 chance. One big exchange of a hundred missiles adds about 25, and at 255 the world ends at the next week's end.
Read the IN tray every week. Mail still unread when the week ends runs its follow-up, as if you had ignored it.
Use the pauses. The clock stops whenever a window is open, so a report, the radio or the satellite panel can stay up while you think.

02 · Differences

What differs from a C64

The game plays as it does on a C64, at the C64's pace. These are the places where the page cannot be the machine, and what it does instead.

On a C64	On this page
The game loads from disk, behind a copy protection, and the loader hands over at `$4E96`.	There is no loading. The page starts at `$4E96` with the memory as the loader leaves it, and the options panel and its tune come up at once.
Each instruction takes its cycles, and the video chip takes some of the processor's on the lines where it fetches characters and sprites.	The port executes no instructions. Each routine costs the cycles it costs the game, and one whose work varies costs it by the work: the characters and pictures drawn, the bytes filled and copied, the cells a window saves and puts back, the dots of the satellites and missiles and how far each is shifted to its pixel. The video chip takes its cycles as the beam passes those lines, so a window draws and a week's end runs long where they do on a C64.
The interrupt can fall between any two instructions. While a radio message unscrambles, it draws the next character with a random number left in the byte the main program reads the controls through, so an interrupt between the main program's store and its read changes what the controls read: fire held as a message opens can close it at once.	The interrupt runs whole between two of the port's steps, and never between that store and that read, so the controls always read as they are.
The SID plays the game's tune, which the interrupt's sound driver moves on 45 times a second.	The game's own sound driver runs on the site's 6502 in the port, and the site's model of the SID, with the filter of the C64's original 6581, plays what it writes as each frame is shown.
The game reads a joystick in control port 2 or the keyboard, as the options panel chose, and the options panel reads `F1` and `F3`.	The arrows are the joystick, and `Space` is both its fire button and the C64's `Space`, the keyboard control's fire; the letters, `F1` and `F3` are the C64's, and the bar has F1 and F3 for a touch screen, where the pad is the joystick. A tap shorter than a frame is held until the game has read it.