How to play

What you need

A copy of the game, installed on your computer. Amber Folio asks for the folder that the installation created — the whole folder, as the installer left it. It works out the rest: which program to start, and how the game should be set up.

The games page shows where each title is sold. Most are sold as part of a collection.

Handing over the folder

Hand over the folder the game was installed into. Sub-folders come along too, including any saved games that came with your copy.

A zip or a .tar.gz of that folder works as well: choose it or drop it instead of the folder. If it is on Dropbox, paste its share link into the player and your browser downloads it straight from Dropbox — it never passes through this site.

Your copy is kept privately in your browser, so you hand the folder over once rather than on every visit. It is never uploaded anywhere. A browser can clear its storage when it is short of space, and clearing site data always will, in which case you hand it over again.

What the game saves is kept in your browser too, beside your copy, and put back the next time you play. It stays there: nothing is copied anywhere else. Keep your own copies of any saves you care about; status says what has not been tried yet.

Supported versions

Amber Folio supports the release of each game that is sold today, and the enhancements are made for that version.

The copy-protection question

The game asks you to look up a word before it will start. Answer it from whatever your copy came with — the wheel, the manual, or the code generator the releases sold today ship instead of one — and that is the whole of it: the enhancement that remembers is on from the start, so the question is asked once and never again.

Nothing is shown to the player and nothing is asked of you beyond the game’s own question. The first launch is the game’s own, the enhancement watches the game’s own check, and when you get it right it remembers that. Every launch after that goes from the titles straight to the menu.

What is written down is that you answered, against the fingerprint of the program itself — not the question, not the answer, not the time. It is kept in this browser and nowhere else, and the player’s Enhancements panel has a button that forgets it, after which the game asks again. Nothing here answers the question for you: there is no way past that check that does not go through you answering it. What the enhancement does, and what it does not, is under enhancements.

Older releases shipped a PDF of the wheel, and if yours does it arrives with the folder, is recognised, and is kept here with your copy of the game. It unlocks nothing, so the player asks for nothing: the emulator dropped that requirement in this build, because a release a player buys today has no such PDF in it and a check nobody can satisfy is not a check.

The Adventurer’s Journal

The game sends you to a printed booklet for its entries, tales and proclamations. Show the player your own PDF of it and the emulator puts that text on the game’s own screen: an entry opens where the game cites one, and a Notes command on the party’s bar keeps the log of everything cited so far.

It comes in three ways — with the folder, through the files panel’s own button for showing a document, which takes any file from anywhere on your machine, or from a Dropbox share link pasted beside that button, which your browser downloads straight from Dropbox — and every way it is kept in this browser and nowhere else. The file is hashed here and the emulator is shown the digest; an edition it does not recognise is refused rather than guessed at, and the player prints that file’s fingerprint so it can be identified.

One extra step, once. The journal has to be read rather than recognised, so the files panel has a Read your journal button, and pressing it downloads an OCR engine — about seven megabytes — from this site itself, never from anywhere else. Nothing is downloaded until you press it. The reading takes minutes; the text it produces is kept with your copy, so a later visit uses it rather than reading again.

The emulator knows one edition of the journal today. A scan it does not know is refused with its fingerprint, because where each entry sits on the page is true of one file and following those positions into another produces nonsense rather than a warning. What the reader does with the text is under enhancements; what nobody has tried yet is on status.