Séance

The cartridge

One year ago today, law enforcement found your uncle dead in his home, clutching an unmarked video game cartridge.

He worked for the famous game company Tendendo and often had access to the latest games before wide release.

With the cartridge was a note:

This game is cursed.

You inherited the cartridge, and now you’re about to find out why.

The ghost The Ghost Chip, experimental a larger network, a transformer, whose arithmetic is done by a vector engine in a custom FPGA core for the EverDrive N8 Pro cartridge (build test20). This page emulates that core. The Ghost Chip also runs on a real NES console with an EverDrive N8 Pro. It loads 3.7 MB more. The original ghost the first version: a character-level network of about 150,000 weights that the NES’s own processor runs, with a 648-word dictionary; its letters come quickly (version 0.11a) The no-chip ghost a small recurrent network that the NES’s own processor runs, from a plain MMC3 cartridge (build test18)

Arrows, Z B, X A, A Select, S or Enter Start. A gamepad works too. Your keys type on the Family BASIC keyboard; Enter asks. A gamepad works too. The controller’s buttons appear under the screen.

How to hold the séance

Type a question and press Enter to ask.
Spell a question on the board with the arrows and X (A), then press S or Enter (Start).
Tap the box under the screen to type with your keyboard; Return asks.
Or spell a question on the board with the D-pad and A, then press Start.
The answer comes one letter at a time.
Five nights; six questions a night.
EscA (Select): the menu and the journal.
Select: the menu and the journal; Select with up or down: your past questions.

Keyboard mode

`Backspace` `Home`	erase a letter; clear
`↑` `↓`	past questions
`Tab`	silence it
`F1`–`F5`	controls, journal, music, effects, save

Control pad modeKeys

Arrows	move on the board
`X` (A) `Z` (B)	write a letter; erase or back
`S` `Enter` (Start)	ask, or silence it
`A` (Select) + ↑ ↓	past questions

The line under the screen switches between keyboard and control pad mode. More in the questions and answers.

Recovered frames

The title screen: SÉANCE over a dark engraved landscape, with BEGIN below. — The title

The intro: a figure at a table by candlelight, and the words: With the cartridge was a note: This game is cursed. — The note

The séance board: the planchette, a row of candles, and the question WHO ARE YOU? spelled out above the letters. — A question

A mansion on a hill against a night sky. NIGHT ONE. FIVE DAYS TO ESCAPE THE CURSE. — Night one

A rain-streaked window over a row of candles: the end of night five. — The end of a night

About this cartridge

Séance is a game for the Nintendo Entertainment System designed by Benj Edwards and coded using Claude Code with Opus 5.5.

The spirit’s words come from a small neural network that the NES’s own 6502 processor runs: a recurrent language model that works in words. It thinks of each word for about a second, and the word’s letters appear one at a time. Everything happens on the cartridge (here, in an emulator in your browser). So far it has been tested in emulators and on a real NES console with an EverDrive N8 Pro flash cartridge.

Questions and answers: how the neural network works

It is an NES ROM: mapper 4 (MMC3), 512 KB of program ROM, 128 KB of graphics, battery save. This is version 0.11a with the no-chip language model (build test18), and it is still experimental: so far it has been tested in emulators.

The game supports the Famicom’s Family BASIC keyboard (HVC-007). On this page your computer’s keyboard stands in for it.

Under the screen you can also choose the Ghost Chip (build test20, experimental): a larger model made for a custom FPGA core on the EverDrive N8 Pro cartridge. The page emulates that core; the Ghost Chip has also run on a real NES console with an EverDrive N8 Pro. Or choose the original ghost (version 0.11a): the first version’s character-level network.

The ROMs

All three are experimental.

seance_benjedwards_v0.9N.nes: the no-chip language model, the version this page plays by default. An ordinary NES ROM (MMC3).
seance_benjedwards_v0.9G.nes and seance_benjedwards_v0.9G.rbf: the Ghost Chip accelerator version, with faster and deeper conversations. For an EverDrive N8 Pro only. Keep both files, with the same name, in a folder of their own.
seance_benjedwards_v0.9.nes: the original ghost, the first version’s character-level network. An ordinary NES ROM (MMC3).
SHA-256 checksums

Pictures from public-domain engravings by Gustave Doré, Luke Fildes, Rembrandt van Rijn, John Tenniel, Samuel Palmer, A. B. Frost, Horace Castelli and others. Type: IM Fell by Igino Marini (SIL Open Font License). The emulator on this page is EmulatorJS 4.2.3 with the FCEUmm core (GPL-3.0; license, source). The Family BASIC keyboard and the Ghost Chip’s engine are added to it by this page’s own JavaScript.

NES and Nintendo Entertainment System are trademarks of Nintendo. Séance is an independent game, not made or endorsed by Nintendo. Tendendo is fictional.

This page keeps anonymous play counts: which ghost, how long, phone or computer, how far the game got, and a random number kept in your browser to count return visits. It keeps no names, IP addresses or cookies, and sends nothing when your browser asks sites not to track it.