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

• 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 SCEN resources rather than anything synthesised for this site.

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

Two items remain open — both narrow, and both listed on the Status & Open Work page. The container and pixel formats Spirit shares with the other four games are documented once, in Shared Formats.

Source of truth

These pages are a curated summary of the main repository’s raw research notes (not part of this site) — and where they disagree, the raw notes win: docs/spirit/plan.md for the complete, current status of every format, docs/spirit/amiga/ for the byte-level specs and every disassembly citation, and docs/spirit/TODO.md for the single status surface.