Yet another long lost Codemasters game, but one which is in fact been under our noses all along! Magnum Force was yet another title from the great Gavin Raeburn and is a sort of sooped up Scramble clone with end of level baddies and power ups. It’s quite a fun little budget title, and with the bonus of some previously unheard tunes by Gavin with digitized sounds.
It was never properly released as a stand-alone Codemasters title, but it was just recently discovered lurking on the Codemasters 30 games CD pack that was released back in the day. We assume that not many people actually purchased the package, and as a result – the game has remained on CD, unpreserved.
Richard Bayliss flagged up on the Lemon64 forums that someone had reviewed the CD pack which revealed the game that no-one recognized. Thanks to a dump of the CD on archive.org by Encore64, Tom-Cat/Nostalgia managed to extract the game from CD and convert it to a PRG. This was then tested/bug fixed and tidied up by Fungus/Nostalgia for a special new release in February 2025.
Tom-Cat has kindly passed on the original ripped file, which is included in the download. Under the articles section below, we have included their input about how the game was ripped.
The question is – why wasn’t this released individually, and why on the 30 pack? Our thought is that one of the games on the Spectrum/Amstrad that was due for release on the C64 fell through, and Codemasters were left short of titles – so included Gavin’s game which they had previously dropped. Magnum Force is not actually mentioned in the manual at all for some reason. A bit of a mystery we hope to solve someday!
Contributions: Richard Bayliss, Fungus/Nostalgia, Tom-Cat/Nostalgia, S!R/Nostalgia, Erhan/Nostalgia
Supporting content
Available downloads
- Game_Magnum_Force (zip)
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Related articles
Details from Tom-Cat about how the game was extracted
The game was ‘cracked’ from the Codemasters CD. It seems it was not released in any other form before or after that, and no scene release of it exists.
There were no DOCS or loading screens present, so what you see here is all there was. The only mention of the game is in the listing of the C64 version of the Codemasters CD.
The transfer was done using a ripped WAV track of the game (track 11). There was a tape present with the initial loader, which also included the volume adjustment tool.
There were two blocks present on the track—the first block only contained the loader for the second block. Both blocks contain completely different encoding, with the first one being much slower.
The loader for the second block includes two versions, depending on the polarity of the CD output. However, one of the versions has a bug, preventing it from loading past the SYNC signal.
The second block is saved twice on track 11, the second time at half speed—probably because the loader hits the limit of the frequencies that can be used, and some low-cost CD players would likely fail on the fastest version.
Both left and right channels are used:
The left channel (which goes to the FIRE button pin on joystick port 2) is the clock/sync signal.
The right channel (which goes to the UP pin) contains the actual data.
The data uses 9 bits to encode (the 9th bit is used to invert (EOR) the byte if needed — without this, a continuous stream of $FF or $00 bytes would not be possible to encode).
