Instructions
Walk through the maps, avoid traps, kill the Bad Guys ... and try to stay alive long enough to accomplish your mission! While you can also try to maximize your score on the way, the score does not really matter.
Rick can fire bullets, lay sticks of dynamite, walk, crawl, climb, and also poke walls or Bad Guys with his stick. Poking walls can trigger traps, open doors, etc. although sometime a dynamite stick or a bullet is needed ... go figure. Rick starts with six bullets in his gun, and six sticks of dynamite, as shown by the icons at the top of the screen.
Command Line Options
-fullscreen |
Run in fullscreen mode. The default is to run in a window. |
-speed <speed> |
Run at speed <speed>. <speed> must be an integer between 1 (fast) and 100 (slow). The default is 40 and corresponds to the original Atari speed. |
-zoom <zoom> |
Display with zoom factor <zoom>. <zoom> must be an integer between 1 (320x200) and n (n times bigger). The default is 2. |
-game <game> |
Play Rick Dangerous <game>. <game> must either 1 or 2. The default is 1. |
-map <map> |
Start at map number <map>. <map> must be an integer between 1 and 4. The default is to start at map number 1. |
-submap <submap> |
Start at submap number <submap>. <submap> must be an integer between 1 and 47. The default is to start at submap number 1 or, if a map was specified, at the first submap of that map. Only for game 1, not yet available for game 2. |
-keys <keys> |
Override the default key bindings (see below). |
-nosound |
Disable sounds. The default is to play with sounds enabled. |
-vol <vol> |
Play sounds at volume <vol>. <vol> must be an integer between 0 (silence) and 10 (max). The default is to play sounds at maximal volume (10). |
Controls
| UP [O] |
||
| LEFT [S] |
FIRE [SPACE] |
RIGHT [D] |
| DOWN [K] |
FIRE+LEFT, FIRE+RIGHT = poke a wall (or anything else) with your stick
FIRE+DOWN = lay a stick of dynamite
FIRE+UP = fire a bullet
You can redefine these keys from the command line, with the -keys <keys> option. <keys> is a sequence of five keys in the form: <left>-<right>-<up>-<down>-<fire>. For example, -keys f-g-u-h-space maps [F] to LEFT, [G] to RIGHT, [U] to UP, [H] to DOWN, and [SPACE] to FIRE. Values are SDL scancodes without the SDL_SCANCODE_ prefix.
Note that scan codes represent the physical position of the key on a "normalized" US keyboard, not the actual key on your keyboard. On an AZERTY keyboard, Q means A, for instance.
Commands
| [P] | Pause |
| [E] | End (game over) |
| [ESC] | Exit |
| [F1] | Toggle fullscreen mode |
| [F2], [3] | Zoom in or out (only when not running fullscreen) |
| [F4] | Mute |
| [F5], [6] | Increase or decrease sound volume |
| [F7] | Toggle Trainer cheat mode (always six bullets, six sticks, six Rick); when active a T shows in the upper-left corner of the screen |
| [F8] | Toggle Never Die cheat mode (nothing can kill Rick); when active a N shows in the upper-left corner of the screen |
| [F8] | Toggle Expose cheat mode (see all entities); when active a V shows in the upper-left corner of the screen |
Use the "never die" mode with care. Although it lets you walk through Bad Guys unharmed, it can produce strange results: some Bad Guys are meant to be killed, and if you don't, who knows what will happen? Also, if a block of bricks moves over Rick, it won't kill him, but then Rick will be trapped because, well, you can't move through bricks.
Trivia
Sounds used to be WAV captures loaded from a companion data.zip file, and played through SDL. In 2026, that has been replaced with true SNDH sounds played thanks to Arnaud Carré's AtariAudio library (MIT Licence). Sounds are now as best as they can be. And because you may want the sounds but not the game, feel free to download (and play with e.g. Arnaud's SNDH Player):
The demo mode has been produced by Claude solving the game and recording the moves as keyboard or joystick inputs. All the moves are thus perfectly legit, as they are played by the actual game engine. On the other hand they do not always make sense ; for instance Rick has a weird tendency to drop useless bombs at random...
The knowledge base contains details about the Claude-solving process, and the source code branch solver contains the solver code. Note that I did not write that code: Claude did, and it may show.