Welcome to my Space Hawks tech page
I reverse-engineered this Amstrad CPC game and I'd like to share my finds with everyone.
Be free to use it for FREE projects, not commercial.
► Introduction
The first computer, even before my first VGS, to come on my house when I was a kid was the Amstrad CPC 464.
It took hours to load a game with its tape but I could say we used it a lot.
We focused mainly on 2 games : Space Hawks and Harrier Attack.
First because they were fund, second because they were "fast" to load.
We played with a lot of others games but these two are the ones I still clearly remember.
Next come pyjamara, oh mummy, street hawk, ... and even a ski game I coded myself, based on one of these books available.
Basically, Space Hawks is a Space Invaders clone (hence the name!) with an illegal use of the Star War theme.
But they added this f*****g mine, which made it almost impossible to finish !
Yes, there was a time when, to make a great game, you didn't need to make it easy.
► Reverse Engineering
I used a tape dump I found on the Net since I own the original but don't know how to EASILY dump it to PC .
I then loaded the tape on of one the tape explorer available and extracted the .bas and .bin
the BAS is an compiled version of a BASIC loader
the BIN is the assembled version of the z80 game
I loaded the BIN on IDA and, using a special CPC loader I wrote (see below), I disassembled the game.
The game isn't very complex so it was easy.
I was even able to wrote a script for WinAPE to dump the sound (yes, even the infamous Star Wars theme!)
Please note I didn't go as far as make a full source code, easy to assemble.
My goal was only to analyse the engine, to make a remake first for mobile (already available on Android stores) and then for 'another' platform ;)
► Files
► Ports
Thanks to this source code and tools, Space Hawks was unofficially ported to
► Thanks
Durell, and even more Simon Francis, for this game!
All of this exists because some people on the Net made a wonderful work before me
-Richard Wilson for WinAPE
-CPC Wiki for all the informations I needed
- last modified : 23 March 2016
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