Yet another long lost Codemasters game, but one which is in fact been under our noses all along! Magnum Force was yet another title from the great Gavin Raeburn and is a sort of sooped up Scramble clone with end of level baddies and power ups. It’s quite a fun little budget title, and with the bonus of some previously unheard tunes by Gavin with digitized sounds.
It was never properly released as a stand-alone Codemasters title, but it was just recently discovered lurking on the Codemasters 30 games CD pack that was released back in the day. We assume that not many people actually purchased the package, and as a result – the game has remained on CD, unpreserved.
Richard Bayliss flagged up on the Lemon64 forums that someone had reviewed the CD pack which revealed the game that no-one recognized. Thanks to a dump of the CD on archive.org by Encore64, Tom-Cat/Nostalgia managed to extract the game from CD and convert it to a PRG. This was then tested/bug fixed and tidied up by Fungus/Nostalgia for a special new release in February 2025.
Tom-Cat has kindly passed on the original ripped file, which is included in the download. Under the articles section below, we have included their input about how the game was ripped.
The question is – why wasn’t this released individually, and why on the 30 pack? Our thought is that one of the games on the Spectrum/Amstrad that was due for release on the C64 fell through, and Codemasters were left short of titles – so included Gavin’s game which they had previously dropped.
Thanks to Colin Bell for flagging up – Magnum Force is mentioned in the track listing, but for some reason does not have any specific game instructions like with the other titles included. A bit of a mystery we hope to solve someday!
Contributions: Richard Bayliss, Fungus/Nostalgia, Tom-Cat/Nostalgia, S!R/Nostalgia, Erhan/Nostalgia, Colin Bell, Arcachnar
Supporting content
Available downloads
- Game_Magnum_Force (zip)
Gallery
Related articles
Details from Tom-Cat about how the game was extracted
The game was ‘cracked’ from the Codemasters CD. It seems it was not released in any other form before or after that, and no scene release of it exists.
There were no DOCS or loading screens present, so what you see here is all there was. The only mention of the game is in the listing of the C64 version of the Codemasters CD.
The transfer was done using a ripped WAV track of the game (track 11). There was a tape present with the initial loader, which also included the volume adjustment tool.
There were two blocks present on the track—the first block only contained the loader for the second block. Both blocks contain completely different encoding, with the first one being much slower.
The loader for the second block includes two versions, depending on the polarity of the CD output. However, one of the versions has a bug, preventing it from loading past the SYNC signal.
The second block is saved twice on track 11, the second time at half speed—probably because the loader hits the limit of the frequencies that can be used, and some low-cost CD players would likely fail on the fastest version.
Both left and right channels are used:
The left channel (which goes to the FIRE button pin on joystick port 2) is the clock/sync signal.
The right channel (which goes to the UP pin) contains the actual data.
The data uses 9 bits to encode (the 9th bit is used to invert (EOR) the byte if needed — without this, a continuous stream of $FF or $00 bytes would not be possible to encode).
Update history
- 10/04/25 – Segment added about Zzap review
- 07/04/25 – Fix about references in the manual
Here is an article/review about the CD-Games Pack:
https://i.ibb.co/ccDszHHt/ZZAP-64-58-1990-02-0034.jpg
Thank you Arcachnar! Just added to the page with credit to yourself!
Good evening, I’ve recently saw this story and wanted to clear something up with regards to the CD Pack manual.
I’m lucky enough to own both the ZX Spectrum and Commodore 64 CD Pack’s. The first thing to mention is that regardless of which one you have the box is exactly the same bar a yellow (ZX Spectrum) or red (C64) sticker indicating which system it’s for.
On the back are thirty small inlay covers depicting the games included with the pack, although it’s somewhat misleading, for example Twin Turbo V8 is pictured, yet this was never released for the C64 and then there’s Lazer Force, also pictured but a C64 only game.
When it comes to the manual, these are exactly the same as well for each system, Instruction Book V1.0 as it’s called. On page 3 of the manual is a Commodore 64 – Quick Reference Guide and on Page 4 a ZX Spectrum – Quick Reference Guide. This details the the complete Track listing for each CD and on the C64 Reference Guide it clearly shows Track 11 as Magnum Force – so while not on the back of the box it ‘IS’ mentioned in the manual.
The manual goes on to give the instructions for each of the games in alphabetical order but when you get to ‘M’ there’s no Magnum Force. It contains instructions for every other game, including all the ones that don’t feature on the back on the box.
While I’ve had both packs for many years, I’ve only really ever played around with the ZX Spectrum one so never picked up on Magnum Force either – Ha!
I can also tell you that the C64 CD Pack features Poltergeist, Thunderbolt, Redmax, Cosmonaut & Super-G-Man, none of which are advertised on the back of the box and are all C64 only titles with the exception of Super G-Man that was also released for the ZX Spectrum. However the ZX Spectrum Track list doesn’t include Super G-Man.
One thing the ZX Spectrum CD Pack does have that the Commodore 64 one doesn’t is a Demonstration Track – Slideshow, which displays screenshots from all the games. I assume this may have been for demo purposes when set up in a retail environment.
Happy to proved high quality scans to confirm the existence of Magnum Force in the Manual.
That’s fantastic – thank you Colin!
I will update the page quickly. Stupidly, I did see the Magnum Force mention via the scans from archive.org, but was meaning in my text about the lack of instructions. I should have made that much clearer! :D It is really strange about the lack of instructions for Magnum Force, and hopefully one day we’ll find out why! :)
I’ve uploaded a full longplay of this game!
https://youtu.be/2zOrkSu4xwM
it’s really an insane title, and it doesn’t even has an end -_-
Great stuff! I agree, it really is – still stunned its been out there all along! :)
Rather than leave the CD at 600mb, why not convert the software on it to PRG or whatever files & use them as a floppy image? It would require less data.