Games That Weren't 64^®

I can’t really add this to GTW64 as a proper entry, but I thought i’d share – as i’m pretty happy at this particular personal finding.

After doing some preservation work with the Maverick v5 tool on a problematic disk, and with some big success (as you will find out about in good time!), I wondered if it would work on one of my old work disks which contained a SEUCK 1942 clone that I had quickly done in a day and had abandoned at an early stage.

When I say abandoned, unfortunately the disk was a bit dodgy, and the two backups I created both failed to load. Over the years I had attempted to clean the disk and constantly load and try and back up to another disk – in the hope i’d get one of my lost projects back for posterity – the memory of what I had created started to fade too. It was the last thing I had left to digitally preserve fully from my own collection.

Although Maverick didn’t get a 100% working version of a frozen file – the many backups I did with the various tools gave me a selection of builds with varying amounts of corruption. Some versions had a complete sprite set, but missing backgrounds and charsets, the other had a full set of attack waves and a map, but the charset was completely gone. Another file was completely borked apart from a perfectly fine charset. This was far more than I had before, and enough of a jigsaw puzzle that I could carefully piece back together.

Using Jon Wells’ SEUCK memory map lists from issue 45 of Commodore Format, I managed to save out the bits that worked, and then load them all back into a clean build of SEUCK. At the first time of entering SYS24576, the editor was back and so was what remained of what I had saved back in April 1996.

Although nothing to get too excited about, it is a piece of early history that I had hoped to save, and now have done. I’ve tidied up the map a little, just to show some of the blocks I didn’t use but had designed. There are a few attack waves to demonstrate the sprites I had done. Feel free to take a look for yourself, the zip file with the frozen version saved can be found below.

World war game download