Introduction

Knightmare is a first-person Dungeon Master style RPG released by Mindscape for the Commodore Amiga in 1991. It is based on a popular British gameshow which ran from 1987 to 1994, although the game differs somewhat from the show.

The game was written by legendary Amiga coder Tony “Ratt” Crowther, who previously released sci-fi RPG Captive in 1990. Crowther coded the entirety of Captive by himself in only nine months, including graphics. Knightmare re-used the Captive engine with improvements, this time with graphics by dedicated artist Jan Thwaites.

This project

Back in 2014 I started analyzing Gremlin’s 1994 real-time strategy game K240, followed by a similar project for the turn-based dungeon crawler Dungeons of Avalon in 2019. The goal of these projects, which have been very successful, was to reverse-engineer the games and understand the various undocumented game mechanics.

This next project seeks to disassemble Knightmare, a task made more challenging due to Crowther’s especially clever programming methods. Instead of standard file read routines, it uses a custom disk operating system called RATT-DOS, an anti-piracy measure to prevent copying the disk. The game also uses multiple executable files.

As usual, the goals are to document the game mechanics and extract graphics and map data. I also hope to discover the truth of whether the infinite hit points cheat involving apples and rabbit pies is real or fake.

Thanks

• howprice for Aira Force disassembler
• Tim Ruehsen, Frank Wille, and Nicolas Bastien for the original ira disassembler
• Codetapper for Maptapper, a sprite ripper
• Tony Crowther, for developing this game
• Tony McGarry, JOTD and CFou! for the Knightmare WHDLoad
• Pierre “Lyverbe” Fournier, for the The Ultimate Captive Guide, which was useful for some details of Crowther’s works
• Pete Jefferson, for the MMDepaCk music convertor