Spirit of Excalibur
Spirit of Excalibur (Virgin Games / Century Interactive, 1990, Amiga — also released on Commodore CDTV) casts the player as King Constantine, guiding the knights of the Round Table through an Arthurian-legend strategy game across a map of Roman/Dark-Age Britain, punctuated by close-up, hand-authored scenes at each named town, castle and holy site.
This site is a curated, human-readable companion to the reverse-engineering
notes for this game’s Amiga floppy release (see docs/spirit/ in the main
repo for the full research trail, byte-level format specs, and every
disassembly citation behind the claims made here).
What’s here
Section titled “What’s here”- Characters & Creatures — every named hero, villain and troop type, animated with its confirmed walk, attack, death and guard cycles. These segment boundaries aren’t a frame-geometry guess: they come from disassembling and hand-tracing the game’s own FSME bytecode VM, the tiny per-class script that drives each entity’s on-screen animation.
- The Map of Britain — the full 72×60 tile strategic map, decoded down to the nibble-encoded terrain byte and the 16×16-tile atlas it indexes, with all 48 compiled-in locations plotted at their real coordinates.
- Scene Viewer Gallery — six named locations
(Camelot, London, Tintagel, Stonehenge, Dover, Morgan’s Castle) shown as
full landscape-plus-object composites, built from the game’s own
authored
SCENresources rather than anything synthesised for this site.
What’s confirmed
Section titled “What’s confirmed”| Format | Status |
|---|---|
IMAG (still images) |
419/419 decoded and rendered |
FRML (sprite/animation sheets) |
40/40 decoded and rendered |
| FRML animation-frame segments | Confirmed for all 10 hero/character classes via FSME bytecode-VM trace |
MMAP + tile atlas (world map) |
Confirmed — render reproduces recognisable England/Wales/Cornwall coastline |
Entity table (_aForces) |
56/56 records, byte-exact table boundary |
Location table (_aLoc) |
48/48 compiled-default records, all plotted on land |
SCEN (authored scenes) |
138/138 decoded, 99.9% object-id resolution |
EPISODE<n>.DAT save format |
Byte-for-byte, all 5 floppy + CDTV files |
| CDTV platform | Fully catalogued and attributed — CD-exclusive scenes, spoken narration, extra art |
See docs/spirit/plan.md and docs/spirit/TODO.md in the main repo for the
complete, current status of every format.