AI Reverse Engineering

Fort Apocalypse (Commodore 64) — map viewer

drag to pan · scroll or pinch to zoom

The map is the actual playfield rebuilt from the tape — a 215-column-wide cave of 8×8 multicolor characters, decompressed from the game's table-selective RLE exactly as the loader does, drawn with the level's own colours. It is a cylinder — the right edge joins back to the left — so panning scrolls around it endlessly. Drag to pan, scroll to zoom. Animation runs the soft characters the game's interrupt rewrites in place: the energy barriers flashing, the laser grids blinking, the rotating beacons, and the destructible-wall shimmer — the same character animation the C64 does (it has no palette hardware to cycle, so the “animation” is the character bitmaps changing). Objects marks the spawn points the level builder reads from its tables: the player's Rocket Copter (cyan), prisoners to rescue (yellow), tank homes (red), enemy-helicopter patrol points (green), and on Level 1 the cavern teleport drops (white circles). See the write-up for how it was decoded.