Index of the Amiga CD32 / CDTV disc documentation — 18 repositories covering 19 pressings (Prey is documented on CD32 and on CDTV in one repository), plus the shared platform checklist they all feed into.
Every one of these is a commercial CD32 or CDTV disc opened from the file system
up: mastering fingerprints, the .TM block, boot chain, compression, planar
geometry, Red Book audio and text. No repository here contains disc images or
game assets — only measurements and the code to reproduce them.
| Shared platform findings | cd32-platformnotes-doc — the canonical checklist all 19 pressings feed into |
| Disc-by-disc comparison | section 10, Baselines — nineteen columns, validated by tools/addcolumn.py. It lives there and is not copied here, so there is only ever one of it |
Listed in the order they were documented, which is also the order in which the checklist's questions were answered. The Saga column is filled in where the title belongs to a series that may one day earn its own index; it is empty where it does not.
| Title | Year | Studio | Saga | What it is |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Dragonstone | 1995 | Core Design | A floppy game pressed onto a disc it fills 3 % of, whose first-stage loader makes no OS call at all | |
| Marvin's Marvellous Adventure | 1994/1995 | Infernal Byte Systems / 21st Century | Dragonstone's opposite in every respect, and the disc that answers its open question about sector 21 | |
| Prey: An Alien Encounter | 1993 | Almathera / KirkMoreno Multimedia | A 122 MB disc with no audio track at all, whose entire soundtrack is 1,225 files. Also covers the 1992 CDTV pressing | |
| The Speris Legacy | 1996 | Binary Emotions / Team 17 | A Zelda-clone filling 0.74 % of its disc, and the one that broke the .TM rule |
|
| Gloom | 1995 | Black Magic Software / Guildhall | A real-time texture-mapped shooter whose textures, sprites and HUD are all 8-bit chunky | |
| Legends | 1996 | Krisalis Software | A six-floppy A1200 game on a CD that is 89 % full and only 0.72 % game, with 28 Red Book tracks | |
| Liberation: Captive II | 1994 | Byte Engineers / Mindscape | Captive | The largest data track on the format at the time, 82,502 sectors, and 91.2 % of it digitised |
| Microcosm | 1994 | Psygnosis | The first CD32-exclusive disc in the set: 92.3 % of the data track is one 483 MB file holding 30,707 video frames | |
| HeroQuest II: Legacy of Sorasil | 1994 | Gremlin Graphics | HeroQuest | A three-floppy A1200 board game pressed onto a CD that leaves 95.4 % of its volume empty |
| Guardian | 1994 | Acid Software | CD32-first, nothing compressed, and the first genuine real-time polygon engine in the set | |
| Banshee | 1994 | Core Design | The same-label control the set had never had: same publisher as Dragonstone, and almost nothing matches | |
| Fire & Ice: The Daring Adventures of Cool Coyote | 1994 | Graftgold / Renegade | A 1992 floppy platformer on a disc that is 68 % Red Book, and the third D J Pocock master |
|
| Universe | 1994 | Core Design | The first point-and-click in the set, and so the first disc where the content is text: 602,344 bytes of prose | |
| Gunship 2000 | 1994 | MicroProse | The first flight simulator in the set and its first non-British publisher | |
| Superfrog | 1994 | Team 17 | Not one game but a compilation, so most questions get asked three times on one master | |
| Myth: History in the Making | 1992/1993 | System 3 | The disc that turns out to be its own floppy release: three of its five files are one 880 KiB floppy each, exactly | |
| James Pond 2: Codename RoboCod | 1993 | Millennium Interactive | James Pond | Three products on one master — a game, a cartoon and a picture book — where the game is 1.47 % of the bytes, 65.55 % of the volume is a hole of exactly 128 MiB, and the boot script is a signed development diary |
| Alfred Chicken | 1993 | Twilight for Mindscape | The first disc here read from the pressed plastic rather than from an image file, which settled three things seventeen images could not |
Each entry below is the write-up that used to sit in the
Game and engine documentation table of the profile
README, moved here verbatim. Nothing was
rewritten or summarised in the move: same prose, same numbers, same links. The
only change is that a \| written to escape a pipe inside a table cell is now
a plain |, because these are no longer table cells.
Dragonstone (Core Design, 1995) on the Amiga CD32 — a floppy game pressed onto a disc it fills 3 % of, whose first-stage loader makes no OS call at all: it kills interrupts, drives Akiko directly and walks ISO 9660 by hand. The resident loader still carries the "Insert Disk X" prompt in three languages and a UK keyboard map for a console with no keyboard, and its file table is dimensioned for twelve levels with row four blanked to 0xFFFF — level 4 was cut and nothing else on the disc remembers it. Every directory record is stamped 1 January 1978, the AmigaDOS epoch, so the timestamps are a 26-minute log of the build. The localised text is IBM CP437 on an Amiga, two German files are in a third code page, and sector 21 — outside the file system, pointed at only by the volume descriptor — carries the Commodore trademark banner followed by 876 bytes of unlinked Exec object file, message-port routines and debug symbols intact
Marvin's Marvellous Adventure (Infernal Byte Systems / 21st Century, 1994/1995) on the Amiga CD32 — Dragonstone's opposite in every respect, and the disc that answers its open question: sector 21 is byte-identical, all three SHA-1s, so the unlinked Exec object file came with Commodore's trademark block rather than from either studio. Nothing on the disc is compressed and nothing was swept. All 64 level files carry a 360-byte editor trailer naming each level's author, its source paths and whatever the designer was thinking (too much levels!, data suxx, kathrin aus h hilf florian aus b), and the unused half of every one still holds the previous level's memory. The CD32 executable has the floppy release's complete disk map compiled in as plain text, next to the volume names and the four-byte magic it checked them with. The Italian text file is named after Berlusconi, the password screen shipped with its placeholder untranslated in four languages, girls.resource and condom.resource sit in the string pool unreferenced, and the executable opens with BETTER DEAD THAN ZNEVB — ROT13, and level 12 is titled THE CLONE. At the root, run by nothing, a directory containing a working AGA rotozoomer, 550 lines of its 68020 source, and a signed note from the programmer inviting whoever finds it to read them
Prey: An Alien Encounter (Almathera / KirkMoreno Multimedia, 1993) on the Amiga CD32 — a 122 MB disc with no audio track at all, whose entire soundtrack is 1,225 files of exactly 61,440 bytes of raw 8-bit PCM: the chunk size is the number the game writes to AUD3LEN, and the period it writes beside it makes those files 63 minutes 40 seconds at 19,705 Hz. The disc corrects two things the CD32 checklist had generalised too early. The Commodore trademark block is not at sector 21 — Prey's is at LBA 6021, because its volume starts at 6019 behind 6,000 empty sectors, and the volume descriptor says so. And /CD32.TM sits in the root as an ordinary file, dated 10 June 1993, referenced by nothing, byte-identical to that sector: Commodore handed developers the trademark block as a file, and that file already contained the 876-byte fragment of Exec's own source that every disc of the format has been carrying ever since. Its game executable has zero references to the custom-chip base address and 448 absolute register writes, so the usual grep scores it as never touching the hardware while it drives all of Paula. First disc here that really uses AGA — eight bitplanes and palettes ECS cannot represent. The intro animation shipped under the filename Test, C/Prod_Prep is Commodore's factory hard-disk formatter on a retail game disc, the sound effects are named in Danish, the executable still asks for two files that are not there, and several frames of the digitised actors still show the videotape timecode burnt into the picture. Documented alongside the 1992 CDTV release of the same game, which is the control disc: 1,201 files are byte-identical across the fourteen months between the two masters, and it falsified two claims made on the CD32 disc alone — a block of "wrong clock" timestamps that turned out to be the real CDTV build date, and a palette test that scored every ECS palette as 24-bit colour. It is also the first non-ISOCD master in the set, and it shows the .TM block is a shared mechanism with a per-console payload: on CDTV it holds cdtv.device by Carl Sassenrath, with no trademark banner anywhere on the disc
The Speris Legacy (Binary Emotions / Team 17, 1996) on the Amiga CD32 — a Zelda-clone filling 0.74 % of its disc, and the one that broke the .TM rule the other three established: its trademark block is 22,152 bytes of cdtv.device by Carl Sassenrath, byte for byte the CDTV Prey master's, on a CD32 disc cut three and a half years later — so the block is not console-determined, it is whatever file the person cutting the master fed to ISOCD. 35 of 47 files are Imploder-crunched and the decruncher is 350 bytes of 68000 inside the game, transcribed register-for-register to open all of it: the LEV2 container renders every map and all 266 sprite frames per level, in genuine 24-bit AGA palettes. The manual copy protection is reconstructed rather than described — the 5,950 codes are computed, by a six-coefficient polynomial per table, so all seven printed tables are regenerated from the executable and verified against a scan of the card. The four-floppy release survives whole inside the CD32 build: four assigns to cd0:, every data file still addressed by the floppy it lived on, and the build timestamps reproduce the same grouping independently. All sixteen levels are still named Egyptian World / Tuten Carmens Tomb, Makiah-2.Lev shipped with its BGFX tag corrupted to 42 47 00 65 and works because nothing validates chunk tags, the retail master carries a 68000 crash debugger, floppy save-disk code and a keyboard map, and the title module's sample names still hold the composer's letter to the team and his BBS phone number
Gloom (Black Magic Software / Guildhall, 1995) on the Amiga CD32 — a real-time texture-mapped shooter whose textures, sprites and HUD are all 8-bit chunky, on a console whose headline feature converts chunky to planar, and its AKIKO references measure zero in the raw image, in all 131 files and in all 115 decrunched ones. The reason is that there is nothing to convert: the 3D view is displayed as a copper list carrying one MOVE per pixel over bitplanes holding a fixed colour-index ramp, with BPLCON4's BPLAM and the BPLCON3 bank alternating every row so the copper fills one half of AGA's 256 colour registers while the other half is on screen — the renderer emits a colour, not an index. Also: the smallest volume on the format (772 sectors, 0.23 % of a CD) whose game still unpacks to 3.86 MB; CrunchMania as the fifth cruncher here, transcribed out of the loader and 115 of 115 files decrunched on the first run, with the credits screen naming its author; a /freeanim byte-identical to Liberation's; and an out-of-memory handler that flashes the screen red and then writes to address zero
Legends (Krisalis Software, 1996) on the Amiga CD32 — a six-floppy A1200 game copied onto a CD that is 89 % full and only 0.72 % game: 28 Red Book tracks over a 4.9 MB data track, with the floppy release's hard-disk installer still on the disc, asking for the 4.7 MB it occupies and offering to format a boot disk in DF0:. The disc reconstructs its own ancestor four ways — six volume assigns, one floppy name compiled into each level, INSERT LEGENDS DISK 5 still in each level's text, and three-language swap prompts — and Legends_Disk4: is claimed by nothing. Every magic-number scan comes back clean and 79 of 111 files are packed anyway, by a container with no magic at all; the decruncher is 201 bytes in the loader and it is Bytekiller, the cruncher Another World used, with the checksum verification taken out. Because the level overlays are crunched hunk files, the front end re-implements LoadSeg in 400 bytes with the decruncher spliced between reading the body and relocating it. Its 34 sprite banks carry no names and the executables name every object in them, one compiled string per level, matching all 34 banks exactly. All 118 timestamps read 1992-03-06, four years before release and three before the console existed. And the credits are digitised photographs of the team — one of whom, Richard Teather, is also the name in the ISO's data-preparer field
Liberation: Captive II (Byte Engineers / Mindscape, 1994) on the Amiga CD32 — the largest data track on the format, 82,502 sectors, and 91.2 % of it is digitised speech: 1,248 lines recorded twice, stored as bare 8SVX runs with an offset index whose 0xFFFFFFFF entries are the 63 lines nobody recorded. The 3D engine ships as three shared libraries signed (C) Wyvern 1992 — a Blitter renderer, a geometry layer, and a 512-entry sine table with a perspective divide that catches divs.w overflow and halves the scale and retries — and the city's wall surfaces are not textures at all but 10,792 pre-rendered perspective sprites, four banks per file, identical geometry in all 71 files. The game runs three more executables to generate the city, the plot and every conversation, and names byte-identical backup copies of all four as fallbacks. Its boot script mounts a reset-surviving RAM disk and makes it bootable so a reset shows a warning instead of the game. Twelve directory records read 1992-02-05 and the executable's own build stamp says 08-Apr-94, which settles a two-year-early datestamp without a second release to compare against. Akiko is untouched — the best remaining candidate on the format, and the same binary explains why: both CD32-only libraries sit behind one runtime flag. And the disc shipped its text system's source, comments and all, opening with 384 words of notes to translators and the author's phone number, for a localisation that never happened
Microcosm (Psygnosis, 1994) on the Amiga CD32 — the first CD32-exclusive disc in this set and the one that answers two of the checklist's oldest questions. 92.3 % of its data track is a single 483 MB file called cbmbuild, holding 30,707 frames of video in 261 movies with no directory: each frame header carries a look-ahead table of the next eleven frame sizes so a 2x drive can stay ahead, and three nested checksums that all sum to the ASCII constant 'COSM' — enforced at run time by the CD_READXL interrupt, and verified here across all 30,707 headers with zero failures. Akiko is untouched, and this disc finally says why: the decoder writes planar bitplanes directly, ten unrolled move.l per row and +5,760 per plane, so there is no chunky pixel in the pipeline to convert — the conversion happened offline on the Silicon Graphics machines the credits thank. It boots from a five-byte startup-sequence reading cosm, uses AmigaDOS exactly once to turn eighteen filenames into raw sector offsets, and then never touches the filesystem again — which is how a retail Psygnosis disc came to ship with the volume identifier CDTV_TEST and every other descriptor field empty. The executable still carries 77 assembler source-file names in its debug hunks, the release build ships its whole debug console with internal hardware error inlined 195 times as the only error message the product has, and the loader's file table names briefing and eolb4 with a presence flag of 0 — cut content the shipped code is written to step over, with the fourth boss's death and cut-scene modules still linked in. Also: a 203-second Red Book track nothing on the disc ever plays, two eleven-byte files each containing their own filename, four sound effects whose IFF ANNO chunks name AudioMaster IV, and a hidden cheat page threatening to suck the colour from the nice graphics
HeroQuest II: Legacy of Sorasil (Gremlin Graphics, 1994) on the Amiga CD32 — a three-floppy A1200 board game pressed onto a CD that leaves 95.4 % of its volume empty in front of the files, and the disc that adds a sixth cruncher to the format by wearing a familiar one. Every block is stock RNC ProPack 1 — right header, right length arithmetic, both CRCs present — and a stock decoder produces output of exactly the right length that fails the checksum every time, because the literals are XORed with a 16-bit key that rotates one bit after every literal run; three variants ship, told apart by each block's own CRC, and the key was solved rather than searched by exploiting the linearity of CRC-16 over GF(2), turning 65,536 candidate decodes into 128. All 106 blocks verify. The executable has no relocations, no symbols and no debug hunks — impossible for six hunks — because it decrunches and relocates itself in 584 bytes, with 5,524 HUNK_RELOC32 entries compressed inside the hunks and a stub that patches its own return address to enter the program. No AGA register anywhere on the disc and Akiko measured to zero: five bitplanes, six in Extra-Half-Brite, graphics.library opened and never called once, and the colour count settled by a 228-byte root command that blanks exactly 32 registers. The floppy release reconstructs itself — three volume names assigned to cd0: and all 91 paths addressed through them, one of which, Level.Map, is not on the disc. And the leftovers: a retail title screen that still calls the game MASTERS, the publisher's logo shipped twice with the unreferenced copy missing its copyright line, the game's entire ending untranslated in the German and French builds, three Red Book tracks the code cannot reach, a floppy disk-swap loop with no callers, a save that stores 24 bytes and reads 238 back, and the string FrogAndParrot — a pub five minutes from Gremlin's Sheffield office — held in a register across the call that loads your saved game
Guardian (Acid Software, 1994) on the Amiga CD32 — the disc the checklist had been narrowing towards for six titles: CD32-first, nothing on it compressed, and the first genuine real-time polygon engine in the set. Akiko still measures zero, and this one says why in one instruction — the filler is a Blitter cookie-cut, one per polygon scanline, BLTSIZE height 4 so it paints all four interleaved planes at once — so the frame is never chunky and there is nothing to convert; there is no BLTCON1 write anywhere in the program. A six-plane HUD panel sits over a four-plane 3D view on one 239-line display, its per-scanline sky poured out of 4,096 twenty-four-bit LOCT entries per zone by a 7,144-byte copper list, with BPLCON4's BPLAM relocating the whole thing into AGA registers 128–191. Its A1200 floppy release shares 24 files with it byte for byte, packing only the sprite banks that will not fit — which turns this series' compression rule into a controlled experiment. And what shipped: PIRATES FUCK OFF next to the copyright string, a live buffer-overrun canary spelling hElP still checked at run time, the artist's Deluxe Paint working file beside the binary the game reads, a twelfth zone's assets nothing can load, and a boot script whose pressed .bak names a program called sw — the name of the executable on the floppy release
Banshee (Core Design, 1994) on the Amiga CD32 — the same-label control this set had never had: Core published this and Dragonstone, the predictions were written before the measurements, and almost nothing matches. The three things that do are the three nobody wrote — Commodore's .TM file, a SetPatch whose byte-identity only tracks which Kickstart was on the build machine (three of the four other version-groups in the set pair unrelated studios), and RNC ProPack, whose Dragonstone decoder unpacked all 37 streams first run. Everything either team wrote differs: 71 library calls against zero, dos.library against a hand-written ISO 9660 parser, and Akiko at zero on both halves where Dragonstone drives $B80000 as a drive controller. The one cross-disc regularity found runs through the mastering operator instead — the preparer field is D J Pocock, character for character Liberation's, a different studio and publisher, and those two discs are the only ones in twelve leaving a 232-sector trailing run rather than 32, in volumes of 1,687 and 82,502. And what shipped: a live developer hook in the pressed boot script that executes a script off a volume called DebugDisk: if one is plugged in; picture.exe, 9.5 % of the data track and named by nothing on the disc, holding a 640×512 interlaced HAM8 picture behind three RNC ProPack method 2 streams and a 484-byte stub that decrunches and applies its own relocation tables — a file census calls it “hunk executable, uncompressed” and its entropy of 7.84 gives it away; the installer chain as two zero-byte files; an empty /icons; a flashing-border halt loop; a thirty-eighth filename with no record header naming a volume nothing assigns; and, outside the four-language table, eight English-only lines asking how anyone could seriously want to kill animals and civilians. Four languages, CP437 for German and French and a private six-character substitution for Danish — " is Æ, $ is Å, ~ is ø — settled by the ordering of the hall-of-fame alphabet; and a build banner inside the executable, 8/7-94 12:59 CD32 slutp, that dates the master to the minute and proves the 41 files stamped 1992-12-21 are a wrong clock whose relative times still fit the real 17-minute session
Fire & Ice: The Daring Adventures of Cool Coyote (Graftgold / Renegade, 1994) on the Amiga CD32 — a 1992 floppy platformer on a disc that is 68 % Red Book and 0.41 % game, and the disc that turned the checklist's oddest correlation into a finding: the two masters in twelve leaving a 232-sector trailing run instead of 32 were the only two whose preparer field said D J Pocock, the prediction was written down before the volume was parsed, and this one is D J Pocock and 232 — three for three across volumes of 82,502, 1,687 and 1,270 sectors. It also adds a seventh cruncher, PowerPacker 2.0, which has no checksum of any kind, so the only validation is that all 21 streams land on their declared length — and then hides 29 more PP20 streams inside the files it just unpacked, PowerPacker within PowerPacker, that no entropy measurement on the disc can see: not one 8 KB window anywhere exceeds 7.5 bits/byte, because the embedded blobs are 496 to 3,896 bytes inside files of 105–410 KB. Its screen is BPLCON0 = $0611, which a scan of bits 14–12 calls zero bitplanes and which is an eight-plane dual playfield — 320 px of foreground over a 960-px parallax layer — with a 24-bit AGA palette that reaches the chips only through the copper, reloaded 193 times down the screen, and eleven absolute custom-chip writes in the whole 92 KB program. No ISO 9660 field names a developer; XOR the text with 0x1b and the disc says Graftgold Presents, (c) Graftgold 1990,94, 68000 Game System, and a fifteen-name staff roll hidden in the seventh world file. And what shipped: a floppy disk-swap prompt and a manual copy-protection prompt in a CD32 executable, an Assign Libs: Fire:Libs to a directory that is not on the disc, a developer diagnostic panel reporting free chip RAM and disk cache size which is also the only place the version (AGA 1.04) is written down, two empty directories, and a default top high score of 68000 points to AEB — the CPU part number and the programmer's initials
Universe (Core Design, 1994) on the Amiga CD32 — the first point-and-click in this set, and so the first disc where the content is text: 602,344 bytes of prose in four complete languages, 6.53 % of the game once every packed stream is unpacked, with nothing left untranslated. It is also the first with a real bytecode interpreter — sixteen opcodes reached through the complement of the opcode byte, so the commands are $F0–$FF and everything below is inline data, each handler advancing a program counter held in a variable — beside a 41-entry dispatch table and a script format where a positive longword is a code address and a negative one is a command index. Its files are RNC ProPack nested three levels deep: a census sees 47 packed files, a decode-validated scan at every byte offset sees 342 streams, every CRC good, and all the prose is at the bottom layer. The loader calls SuperState() and clears INTENA/DMACON in 757 bytes of code — the other 40,003 bytes of that 40 KB file are a read buffer left in HUNK_CODE — after which the game makes zero library and device calls and rebuilds by hand everything the ROM would have given it: the CD-ROM driver, a private LoadSeg replacement, and a bit-banged I²C driver for the CD32's serial EEPROM where eight other discs here just call nonvolatile.library. That last one broke a prediction and a tool: the Akiko scan this series had carried since Guardian matched two of the eight address-register forms and returned zero on a disc with five sites. The display is six bitplanes with KILLEHB clear — Extra-Half-Brite, an ECS screen on a CD32 — and the only AGA register touched anywhere is FMODE, written once, with zero. And it is the fourth D J Pocock master, leaving 232 unclaimed sectors against ten discs at 32, predicted in writing before the sector map was built. What shipped: eighteen files the executable names and the disc does not have, a complete floppy save-disk system and a UK Amiga keyboard map on a console with neither drive nor keyboard, 1meg.pak and fmem.pak named for memory a CD32 does not have, the intro script mentioning the game's own PC version, and an application identifier reading Iniverse CD32
Gunship 2000 (MicroProse, 1994) on the Amiga CD32 — the first flight simulator in this set and its first non-British publisher, on the second-largest data track of the fifteen at 157.84 MB. That headline number is almost entirely nothing: 63.4 % of the volume is a hole of exactly 100 MiB of zeros, byte for byte, sitting between the volume descriptors and the first file and counted deliberately by the mastering tool; 86.9 % of the file bytes are three CDXL video streams; and the game is 4.2 % of its own disc — 6.62 MB on disc, 7.98 MB resident, so the best chance this series has had to break its 13.3 MB ceiling from above does not come close. The disc describes its own floppy release in plain text — four assigned volumes gs_dsk1–gs_dsk4, Insert GS2000 disk %d, Cannot close the Workbench!, an original-disk check for a file that is not on the CD, and four one-byte files named 1 2 3 4 that are the disk-identity probes for the format string gs_dsk%d:%d — which takes the compression⇔floppy rule to [10 of 10] with 542 validated RNC method 2 streams on a disc under no space pressure at all. cd32rez is 641 KB beginning 00 00 03 F3 with one code hunk and exactly fifteen relocations, all fifteen inside the first sixty bytes: the "code" is a pointer table and the archive lets LoadSeg do its fixup for it. Every one of the 76 loose pictures is correct big-endian IFF and every one of the 41 files using the game's own form types is little-endian, so BASE.SCN declares a 3.4 GB FORM inside a 3 KB file — better evidence of a DOS-side pipeline than any timestamp, which matters because this most DOS-first of publishers produced zero MS-DOS-1980 files. Akiko is 0/0/0/0 (the one $C0DE0000 hit straddles two entries of a stride-16 table) and the frame ends planar: no C2P anywhere, and one BLTSIZE $C814 moving all four bitplanes of a 320×200 buffer in a single blit. It is the fifth D J Pocock master, leaving 232 unclaimed sectors exactly as predicted before the filesystem was parsed — five studios, five publishers, two countries — while refuting the one file-level lead that question had. What shipped: a complete, unreachable Pirates! Gold demo with its own boot script, German language detection, 15 IFF samples hidden in a chip hunk and a 21.6 MB intro, disabled by commenting out one line whose note-to-a-human is still attached; roster.dat, the last file written to the master, a saved squadron called ERASE ME crewed by THE ERASABLES; a font descriptor pointing at a directory that does not exist while the font it wants sits orphaned elsewhere; an empty /GS2000/; and 1.83 MiB of assets stored twice, five of them as quietly different files
Superfrog (Team 17, 1994) on the Amiga CD32 — a 1993 floppy platformer on a disc it uses 1.26 % of, and the sixteenth here: not one game but a compilation, 50.5 % Superfrog against a Super Stardust demo at 39.6 % and an Arcade Pool demo at 7.4 %, which is why almost every question gets asked three times on one master. It is the disc where the size band breaks on one of its two readings and holds on the other: the game is 4.10 MB on disc, comfortably inside, and 13,336,690 bytes resident once all 158 Imploder streams are expanded at both depths — 0.64 % past Marvin's 13,251,697, the fifteen-disc maximum — so the two readings disagree about the same disc for the first time and both are kept. Two predictions written before either was measured, pointing deliberately opposite ways, both landed: the cruncher follows the label (Imploder, like Team 17's Speris Legacy, and Speris's own 350-byte decruncher opens all 96 files unmodified) while the .TM block follows the tool (byte-identical to the twelve ISOCD discs, not to Speris's) — and the disc supplies the mechanism, because the preparer field and the menu's $VER: name the same man, Kenny Grant, a third preparer pattern after D J Pocock and the empty ones, who cut the master and wrote the front end and did not write the game. The 1993 three-floppy release is recovered byte-exact from the CD binary: four parallel vocabularies of the same 85 asset names, and the union of DF0:/DF1:/DF2: equals the SDDISK1: set with zero difference in both directions — disk 1 common, disk 2 worlds 1–3, disk 3 worlds 4–6, with L1FX deliberately on all three to avoid a swap. The music is in a fifth place the checklist did not list: zero ProTracker and zero OctaMED, 37 modules in The Player's own replayer format whose magic is its version string, so neither a tracker scan nor a cruncher scan can see them, plus 27 IFF 8SVX samples that exist only inside a binary. And what shipped: an in-house markup language in source with its comment banners, whose English manual alone has @SCREEN Money and its banner pasted twice — 13 openers against 12 closers, French, German and Italian balanced, all four in correct ISO 8859-1; a build-machine assign SDIFF: left in 26 shipped level files naming eight IFF sources that never left the studio, spelled three different ways across its 52 occurrences; a ninth container format, PaCK, header proven on 9 of 9; two Super Stardust builds a byte diff calls unrelated that agree for 6,083 bytes once the relocations are masked and then differ by one immediate, #1 against #2; a manual viewer shipped twice differing in ten bytes, nine of them the date and one turning SA_DisplayID from PAL:HighRes into PAL:HighRes-Interlaced; nonvolatile.library on a disc where nothing opens it; a six-plane list with KILLEHB clear — Extra-Half-Brite, an ECS screen — on a volume named SuperFrog_AGA, while the real 8-plane AGA screen belongs to Arcade Pool; and a root directory record dated seven days before every file it indexes, stored identically in all three places it lives
Myth: History in the Making (System 3, 1992/1993) on the Amiga CD32 — the seventeenth here, and the disc that turns out to be its own floppy release: five files and two directories, of which three are 901,120 bytes each — one 880 KiB Amiga floppy disk, exactly, bootblocks, valid checksums and unused blocks included, so the floppy ancestor is not inferred but pressed. 94.86 % of the declared volume is a hole of exactly 50.000000 MiB, leaving a 2.72 MB game behind it. The CD-specific part is an 18,656-byte shim with zero relocations carrying four media back ends — DOS, floppy with MFM decoding, hard disk with RigidDiskBlock parsing, and CD driven straight through Akiko with no OpenDevice anywhere on the disc — plus a hand-written LoadSeg, a fixed protection key the floppy had to earn from its copy protection, and a one-byte patch that forces a memory probe to answer "absent". Compression is Bytekiller under the magic DAVE — the programmer's first name, and he is credited three ways on the disc — 23 streams all validated three ways, nesting depth 0, expansion 1.369x, the lowest of ten. The data preparer field names a company, Rob Northen Computing, author of the RNC ProPack that six other discs here use — on a master that does not. And the PVD's 1992-12-21 is falsified by the disc's own trademark block, which is copyright 1993, which retires the same date on two earlier discs for free. Also: Commodore's ConClip 37.7 pressed into unused floppy blocks as the disc's only $VER:, a DOS build path \myth\source\screens\ScreenA.lbm, GGGGGGGG I THINK under THE SERIAL NO IS as a live credit page, the team's nicknames as the default high scores, and three bootblocks dated 29/8/2004
Alfred Chicken (Twilight for Mindscape, 1993) on the Amiga CD32 — the eighteenth here and the first read from the pressed disc itself rather than from an image file, which settles three things seventeen images could not. The 0000000000000 CATALOG that four discs in the set carry is physically on the disc, read from subchannel Q with the valid flag set, so thirteen zeros is a mastering choice and not a dumper losing a real EAN. The 32..232-sector overrun past the declared volume, undecidable from a file, is cut into the glass master: the volume declares 691 sectors, the disc physically holds 918 of valid MODE1 — every one verified on its sync pattern, its own header address and its EDC — and the extra 227 stop exactly where the next track's pregap begins, so the data run is padded up to the following track. And MODE1/2048, which every cue in this set asserts and no disc had ever been checked for, is verified by descrambling raw 2,352-byte sectors and reading the mode byte on all 902, not sampled. The image exists only because neither read path could read all of it — ReadFile stops at the declared volume, the raw path cannot read the system area — so both were used and they agree byte for byte across their 675-sector overlap, a cross-check no single dumper can perform; the drive was caught returning wrong data on the first transfer after a seek, which is invisible to a dumper that does not make each sector prove its own identity. Ten tracks, and 99.02 % of the pressed disc is Red Book audio against a 918-sector data track, so the 1.26 MB game breaks the set's on-disc floor by 43.9 % after it had stood for seventeen discs, at an expansion of 1.297x, the lowest of eleven. RNC ProPack method 1, eleven streams CRC-validated eleven of eleven at nesting depth 0, four of them embedded inside the executable. The preparer is Abersoft, the second company ever to appear in that field — and since Mindscape's other disc here is D J Pocock with a 232-sector run while this one leaves 32, the field follows the work, not the label; taken with Myth, whose preparer wrote RNC ProPack on a master that does not use it, the pair shows the mastering step and the packing step never touch. Tile geometry — 16×16, four bitplanes — derived three independent ways where nothing on the disc stores it. And what shipped: intro, built from source checked out fourteen months before the game, carries a working Amiga hardware debugger — 47 custom-register description strings lifted verbatim from Commodore's hardware/custom.i, and copdis, a copper list disassembler with a null guard; the launcher is 46.9 % SAS/C debug records, symbol table and line numbers intact; the icon's DefaultTool is the word JUNK; End Of All Vars! sits between the globals and the code; the shipped boot script tests for the developer's own volume JJSDISK: and RCS stamped JJS and Hard0: into both executables; 57 tiles are drawn, packed, pressed and never placed by any map; and the disc writes its own title exactly once in a form a human reads — as a 320×184 picture
James Pond 2: Codename RoboCod (Millennium Interactive, 1993) on the Amiga CD32 — the nineteenth here, and the first disc in the set that is three products on one master. Its s/Startup-Sequence is a shell-level main loop — Lab select, a three-way if on an environment variable, Skip select BACK, forever — offering a 1991 two-floppy platform game, a 2 m 43 s CDXL cartoon and a three-language electronic book as three equal branches, and the game is 1.47 % of the file bytes. The data track is 195.6 MiB, the second largest in the set, and the two leading explanations for a track that size are both true at once for the first time: 65.55 % of the declared volume is a hole of exactly 128.000000 MiB — 65,536 sectors, 2^16, every byte verified zero — and 93.90 % of the file bytes are CDXL video. Add the 8.02 MiB of zero padding inside the CDXL chunks (3,324 bytes on every one of 2,530 frames, on top of the 1,122 bytes of audio the header correctly declares), the 32-sector trailing run and the 150-sector overrun, and 69.74 % of the data track is zero. The sector budget closes exactly — 23 + 65,536 + 8 + 34,376 + 32 = 99,975 — which is what a negative finding needs behind it. Its game is 1,033,508 bytes on disc and 1,258,076 resident, 18.1 % and 23.1 % below Alfred Chicken's floor, which had itself stood for one disc: two discs in a row have now moved it, and both are platform games whose content lives in Red Book or in video rather than in the file system, so what the floor was ever measuring is "titles that keep their content in the file system" while the 13.3 MB ceiling has not moved in nineteen discs. Nothing is packed — thirteen container magics over all 205,056,000 raw bytes return zero, no file's first longword is its own size, one of 135 is above 6.7 entropy and has an innocent explanation — and for the first time there is a mechanism rather than an absence: all three of the game's hunks are MEMF_CHIP, 1,185,496 bytes of a 2 MB budget, so there is no room for a decrunch buffer. All seven Red Book tracks are reachable — 966.000 seconds exactly, four of them cut to whole seconds and the two longest the two roundest — from byte 11 of an 86-record, 12-byte-per-level table, where bit 7 of the music identifier chooses Red Book or Paula; all 86 choose Red Book, and the disc issues three CD commands in total (CD_PLAYTRACK, CD_PAUSE twice) with no CD_INFO, CD_TOCMSF, CD_TOCLSN or CD_GETNUMTRACKS anywhere, re-issuing the play from a bare 250-frame countdown. The display is five bitplanes with a 24-bit AGA palette — the one stored copper list writes COLOR00..COLOR31 twice with BPLCON3's LOCT toggled between the passes, and neither LoadRGB4 nor LoadRGB32 is ever called — while an unreachable 469-byte string in the executable reads "I'm sorry that RoboCod hasn't got more colours but if I'd have gone to 8 planes it'd have been so slow… I'm not stupid enough to leave debug symbols in", and the copper list and the hunk chain confirm both claims. Akiko is untouched on all eight address registers, with 122 chunky-to-planar constants as data and zero as immediates; the Blitter writes BLTCON1 = $0000 every readable time and never uses the $CA minterm. Its manual contains no characters at all: 115 IFF ILBM pages, 320 × 200 × 8 planes, in English, French and German, so the localisation has to be measured in pixels — one shared palette across all 115, exactly one page byte-identical across the three languages (the largest and inkiest, i.e. the only illustration), a mean of 12.94 % of pixels differing between the English and French copies of a page, and a Deluxe Paint DPPS chunk on 17 pages, ten English, seven French, none German. The whole disc holds 10,875 bytes of prose, and the largest single contributor is the boot script: 3,922 bytes of which twenty-one are the launcher and the rest is a signed 44-line development diary by Dean Ashton — who is also the name in the ISO 9660 data-preparer field, the seventh individual there and the first whose owner identifies himself on the disc in the first person. Three of the diary's date claims are testable and all three pass: 15 August 1993 was a Sunday and three directories were rebuilt 36 minutes after the time he typed; 13 August was a Friday and the intro video is stamped that evening; four files are stamped between 00:03 and 01:18 on the morning he says he wrote it at 1:30am. It also names four development tools that leave no other trace — 16-bit TARGA captures taken with the red and blue cables swapped, an ARexx script written to fix them, an A3000 that died, a NEC drive on an A4000/040 with beta software — and explains a measurable property of the disc: the cartoon's audio arrived as "2 big AIFF sound samples", which is why it plays as one mono stream on two Paula channels with the period corrected from buffer drift on every interrupt. Twenty-seven per cent of the English on this disc is its authors addressing whoever finds it.