It’s no secret that I always was fascinated with the 1988 game Captain Blood. Last time I played it through was when I’d modified it to run with a virtual floppy drive on an Amiga 600. While the game had been ported to numerous 8 bit and 16 bit platforms, it basically vanished into the haze that was French 80’s SciFi body horror.
But then I saw this tweet:
And sure enough I grabbed a copy of the IIGS emulator KEGS32, the ROM, an OS disk, and booted up System 6.0.1 after putting the OS disk into slot S7D1. I then mounted up the source code diskette found at brutaldeluxe.fr
Captain Blood source code release
Great right?
Well it’s a bunch of assembler files. Ok, so when I try to open one from System 6.0.1 I get this:
Corruption
So not giving up just yet, I loaded up a program called CiderPress that can read the IIGS disk image files, and using that I was able to extract the source.
CiderPress extraction
And then I saw this gen scattered in the ASM files that were.. well honestly pretty bare of any comments. Or sane labels.
TFBD generated externals
Which of course is the output from The Flaming Bird Disassembler, a product of Brutal Deluxe, aka where this ‘source’ came from. Although apparently it can be re-assembled into a working executable, as Antoine had fixed it so the mouse used toolbox calls for the mouse for ROM 03.
I put the source code online in CVS. Although I don’t think many people would care, as it’s reversed and VERY terse.
Good to see Captain Blood get some love, as rough as the decompilation process seems to have been. Even after all these years, i’d say there’s nothing out there quite like it in atmosphere.
It really was a unique game. The whole concept of talking to aliens was so amazing for the time, but strange that nobody has really duplicated it since.
I’m French and I played a lot with this game on my Atari 520 STF !
I still have the originals floppies in a box.
You are making me so jealous!!
The French box art is so cool!