Ashley Routledge recently in 2015 loaned his C64 disks for GTW64 to do a large preservation job. Mostly to try and see if we could recover Daffy Duck, but also to preserve any potentially lost demos, artwork and just Ash’s work in general before the disks deteriorated. A massive thank you to Ashley Routledge allowing us to preserve his disks with the hope that we could find some lost works by the famous duo.
Firstly – here is a a link to the archive so far (last updated – 21/12/15)
Any new findings will be added over time as they are discovered, but below is a brief summary of what has been added (including a gallery further below).
Long lost demos
The lost-ash-n-dave-demos folder is probably the most interesting for most, as this contains “phantoms ii”, which we believe could be the very first Ash and Dave demo that was created.
Along with this is “only-after-6pm” which is confirmed by Ash as one of their demos, and most interesting of all is “revolutions”, which is a Jarre inspired demo that was not quite fully finished or released, and is a very late demo from the duo (it is missing music by Charles Deenen).
There are also some music rips and “crap demos”, which were done in some text editors which may well have been uploaded for fun in the early days. There is also a Double Dragon intro test demo (which is pretty much the title screen) and a Dragon Breed test demo of the main dragon. There is also a Robin Hood graphics demo, allowing you to flip through the levels – which is pretty interesting.
SFX editor
We’re not sure yet if this was released onto Compunet, or if this was just done for Ash n Dave’s own work, but this may well have been used on a number of titles that Ash and Dave worked on.
Compunet Sequence files
This was pretty cool. There were tons of sequence files, which were based on pages and bits that were saved from Compunet. There are some great pieces of history here, including reviews of Ash and Dave’s demos, and pages which Ash and Dave set up with the release of one of their demos. Things which may well be completely lost, due to the Compunet server disks failing many years ago.
You should be able to open these files up easily enough – I just used DirMaster, which gave a reasonable view of the contents.
Graphics
Ash is a brilliant artist, and his C64 work is among some of the best produced. It is inevitable that there would be bits and pieces that never quite made it. Here we have extracted a series of images, which you can load up in your favorite art editor (or use DirMaster – which works well for quickly checking). There is also a directory with some Zoom based images that were found, mostly of released images.
Below is a gallery showing some of what we have found – but there is more in the form of C64 files. Interestingly – Slicks was originally to be called Full Throttle, and there are some digital pictures of Ash and Dave that were found too.
