The amazing Ken Van Mersbergen has done it again, this time with the miraculous preservation of Imagic’s Moonsweeper for the Commodore VIC-20. A conversion missing for 42 years has now been painstakingly restored from printed source code by Ken, with help from Simon Rowe and Torsten Kracke. It is also thanks to the game’s programmer Fred Crimi that the code had been safely kept.
Ken has very kindly allowed Games That Weren’t to add the game to its archives, so you can finally experience it for yourself. Follow the link below for more details, including Ken’s wonderful story of the recovery, and to download the cartridge image:
It has come to my attention that somehow the credit for MoonSweeper on C-64 has erroneously been given to Bob Smith (with port/conversion work credited or associated through Imagic and Softsync developers like Raymond Fowkes or Wendell Brown. That is totally incorrect the port was done by Applied Computer Technology and the Author who did the port was Daniel Filiberti. How do I know this? He is my Brother and after years of digging I have recovered most of the source he wrote on Apple II disks. We should have it soon but this was documented on my Page for years that we did that Port.
” 1984 – Game Software Project “Moonsweeper” for Imagic.
Original program converted from Colecovision to the commodore 64 computer. Assembly Language program for the 6502 Microprocessor was 48K in size.”
Hi Peter, many thanks for the information, and that’s fantastic to hear that you may have recovered much of Daniel’s original source code.
Just to clarify, this particular post is about Fred Crimi’s VIC-20 conversion of Moonsweeper, rather than the Commodore 64 version, so we haven’t attributed the C64 conversion here.
I can see that Gamebase64 currently lists Bob Smith for the C64 version, so if that information is incorrect, corrections can be sent directly to the Gamebase64 team at gb64@gmx.net.
Very interesting to hear about the surviving source though, and I hope you’re able to recover everything successfully!