1986 · Mindscape

About this page

The copy studied

The copy is a Mindscape disk. It shows the Mindscape logo and asks for Training or Adventure; each has its own set of files. This site covers the Adventure. Its loader reads six files and moves some of them under the Commodore's input and output chips and its operating system ROM, until the game fills memory from $0400 to $FFF8.

Footprint

Every byte of the C64's 64 KB, one pixel each, 512 to a row. Lit pixels are what this game is: its code, graphics, level data, sound, text, tables and variables, exactly where they sit in memory. Dim areas are screen and working memory; dark is unused.

Status

Contributors

• air (4 commits)
• unorig (2 commits)
• Gregg Barnett — game design and programming (the C64 manual, Lemon64's copy, read 1 October 2026)
• Greg Holland — backgrounds and scenery (same source)
• Russel Comte — character animations and sprites (same source)
• Nigel Spence, Trevor Nuridin and Bruce Bayley — graphic arrangements (same source)
• Neil Brennan — original music (same source)
• Bruce Bayley — sound effects (same source)

Other places to love this game

• Fist II: The Legend Continues manual (image) – Lemon64

Sources

1. The Melbourne House manual for the C64 cassette: Lemon64's copy (image), read 1 October 2026, and Gamebox64's scans of the leaflet and the supplementary instructions (scans), read 2 October 2026: the story, the credits, the controls, Chi, the trigrams, the enemies and the Tournament.
2. "FIST 2 the legend continues: Guide to the entire game", a text guide by the Lemon64 member exploding fist64, posted on the Lemon64 forum on 2 March 2018: the order of play and the rooms where the scrolls are activated.
3. A hand-drawn map of the game by Master Lee and hiTCH-HiKER, December 2008, given by the contributor: the key's names for the eight scrolls' powers.
4. Magnus Andersson's walkthrough on GameFAQs, May 2007: the crossing at the waterfall.
5. A player's comments on the Lemon64 forum, given by the contributor on 1 October 2026: enemies coming back after a number of defeats, from play on the cassette version.
6. Wikipedia, "Beam Software", read 1 October 2026: the studio's other games.
7. Search-result summaries of archive.org, Lemon64 and the Finnish Retro Game Comparison Blog, read 30 September 2026: the publishers and the two titles.
8. Mallo, "Fist II: The Legend Continues, Commodore 64", The King of Grabs, 19 January 2023: a review of the C64 version.
9. The US manual, Fist: The Legend Continues, Mindscape, 1986 (PDF at Games Database), read 1 October 2026: the Training rules. It names no one, only Beam Software, Melbourne House and Mindscape.
10. "Fist II: The Legend Continues", Super Chart Island, 13 April 2026, given by the contributor: the Gallup chart, the C64 magazine reviews it quotes, and Gregg Barnett's words to Retro Gamer.
11. "The Way of the Exploding Fist", Super Chart Island, 15 September 2025, given by the contributor: the first game's twelve weeks at the top of the UK chart.
12. Andreas, "Interview with Nigel Spencer", C64.com, 4 January 2011, given by the contributor: the screen editor and the levels.
13. Souri, "Interview with Gregg Barnett", Tsumea, 2014 (the date Helen Stuckey's thesis gives), read 2 October 2026, given by the contributor: when he joined Beam.
14. Neil Carr, "An interview with Neil Brennan", Remix64, 28 November 2020, given by the contributor: how he composed for Beam's games. It does not mention Fist II.
15. Helen Stuckey, Remembering Australian videogames of the 1980s: what museums can learn from retro gamer communities about the curation of game history, PhD thesis, Flinders University, 2016 (at the Internet Archive), given by the contributor on 2 October 2026: Bill McIntosh on the trapdoor and the nine warriors (from his 2006 interview for ACMI), and Gregg Barnett as Beam's Commodore expert.

What the game does, and where we found it

Read this before annotating code. What the game is documented to do, with verification status against the binary. Statuses: open (documented, not found yet), traced (in the code, could not be exercised; say what was tried), confirmed (in the code, consistent with the emulator), live (observed directly), differs (the code does something else). "Absent" is not a status.

Sources:

• The contributor allowed looking the game up online. On 30 September 2026 this session's network refused every game site it tried (archive.org's copy of the Mindscape manual, Lemon64, CSDb, GameFAQs, C64 Online, the FRGCB blog). What is below comes from web search result summaries of those pages, read the same day: leads, weaker than a page.
• The C64 manual, Lemon64's docs image, given by the contributor on 1 October 2026 and read in full: story, enemies, Chi, meditation, trigrams, controls, Tournament and credits. It replaces the summaries below wherever they differ.
• Search summaries of archive.org ("Fist: The Legend Continues", Mindscape manual text), Lemon64 and the FRGCB blog: developed by Beam Software, published by Melbourne House (UK) and Mindscape (US), 1986.
• Wikipedia's "Beam Software" article, read 1 October 2026: a Melbourne studio working for Melbourne House; its 1980s list includes The Hobbit, Sherlock, The Way of the Exploding Fist (Gregg Barnett, 1985), Rock'n Wrestle (1986), Shadows of Mordor (1987) and Samurai Warrior (1988), each released on the C64. The Overview's list of Beam's other games comes from here. Programming Gregg Barnett, music Neil Brennan, graphics Russel Comte and Greg Holland. The Warlord rules from a volcanic stronghold; the Fist Masters hid their secrets on scrolls and built shrines and temples for meditation. Find eight scrolls and bring each to its meditation chamber; the scrolls' power opens the way to the volcano. The life bar refills slowly outside fights; meditation rooms refill it and are respawn points. The C64 cassette's second side held a "Combat Practice Program".
• The same summaries on the controls: left and right walk; fire with a direction back turns round; up evades a sweep and climbs stairs; down ducks or climbs down; without fire, up-forward is a high punch and down-forward a jab; with fire: up a flying kick, up-forward a high kick, up-back a back kick, forward a mid kick, down-forward a low kick, down a sweep, down-back a rear sweep; a roundhouse kick.
• The game's own screens: the menu (Training, Adventure), the title.

Features

Beyond the documentation

• The game runs two tasks on two stacks: the scrolling is done by a background task that the interrupt switches to.
• Fighters are stored facing one way and mirrored as they are unpacked.
• The fighters' sprites are split down the screen in one of seven layouts.
• A second fighter on joystick port 1 is wired into the input routine.

Open questions

See facts.md, Open questions.

Outside sources checked on 1 October 2026

• Magnus Andersson's GameFAQs walkthrough (final version, 30 May 2007; gamefaqs.gamespot.com/c64/571009-fist-the-legend-continues/faqs/48570), read through a fetch summary with quoted sentences. It collects every trigram "without using the "restore cheat"-trick at the waterfalls"; numbers 39 enemies, the last two "Warlord 1" and "Warlord 2, glowing mask"; wolves "won't kill you, just drain your energy"; a trigram stops the "green radioactive (or poisionous, I don't know) chamber" draining energy (scroll 8, $2CE4, agrees); one gives night vision in the pitch-black place (scroll 7, $10E5, agrees); and "Fall down into the hole, and the game is completed". Checked against the tables: the volcano rooms 60, 61 and 63 each hold an opponent record, and the way on from 63 to the ending, room 122, is an exit of type 3 (stick up and right at column 69), not a hole; what the player sees there has not been watched. The RESTORE key pauses the game ($3C23); how a pause would help at the waterfalls is open. The count of 39 has not been compared: the encounter table has 40 opponent records (flags bit 6 clear), and hordes add opponents beyond them.
• Mallo's review on The King of Grabs (19 January 2023, C64): developed by Beam, "mostly by the same people who made Fist One", published by Melbourne House in 1986, music by Neil Brennan; "bugs that make defeated enemies re-appear" (the code makes this deliberate, $2820); "no end game screen, and no title screen" (the Mindscape disk studied here shows a title picture while loading, and the ending is the final scene $2DB5; the review's copy is not named); a one-on-one tournament version "given away for free on side two".
• The Mindscape manual for the US release, Fist: The Legend Continues (gamesdatabase.org PDF, filed under Melbourne House; read through a fetch summary with short quotes, 1 October 2026). Copyright Beam Software, "From Melbourne House Publishers Ltd", Mindscape; no individual credits. It describes the disk's Training mode: one player "must defeat each opponent twice to advance to the next dan"; two players fight "eight sixty-second rounds, two in each of four locations"; points for every strike that connects and for time remaining after a knockout. It lists the trigrams in the same order as Lemon64's copy and adds that meditation "cures poison", and "underwater hazards" among the dangers. Neither of these two has been checked in the code.
• The pasted text guide ("FIST 2 the legend continues Commodore 64/128 Guide to the entire game") is by the Lemon64 member exploding fist64, linked from lemon64.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=67329 (2 March 2018) as a Google Drive document; the contributor confirmed the thread from a screenshot on 1 October 2026.
• Gamebox64's scans of the Melbourne House cassette manual (two leaflet pages and a supplementary sheet, MH 352/353; given by the contributor on 2 October 2026, copies in the project files, not committed). The same text and credits as Lemon64's copy, plus: the tape loads with the "PAVLOVA" fast loader in about 3 minutes; RESTORE pauses and pressing it again restarts play; F5 "will terminate the game, and return you to demo mode" (the disk restarts instead, $2444); "you will be unable to smash through strong barriers ... with insufficient Chi" (the barrier test $0A2E reads no energy); a poisoned hero "will not regain Chi" until meditation cures him (no poison state found; regeneration $2D14 tests none); Chi drains "underwater, and in poisonous gas chambers" (area 5, $2CE4); entering a temple, the hero walks to the shrine by himself, and fire ends the meditation; sweeps and somersaults are "restricted" in swamps and river currents; some opponents "will still pursue you even if you choose to run"; shoguns often follow "hordes of warrior guards" (hordes, $27A1); the main game is joystick only, in the rear port. The swamp, current and pursuit claims have not been checked in the code.

• Read 2 October 2026, given by the contributor: Super Chart Island's pages on Fist II and The Way of the Exploding Fist (Gallup number one for the week ending 18 October 1986, one week; the first game twelve weeks; C64 reviews in Commodore User, Your Commodore and Zzap!64; Barnett's "reskin" remark to Retro Gamer), C64.com's 2011 interview with Nigel Spencer (screen editor, packing the levels into memory) and Tsumea's interview with Gregg Barnett (joined Beam in 1982). Reviews in Computer & Video Games and Your Computer were left out because the version reviewed is not stated. Super Chart Island also reports a reviewer's complaint about the hero getting "stuck in a loop while the screen moves" and no death message; neither has been checked in the code.
• Remix64's interview with Neil Brennan (Neil Carr, 28 November 2020), given by the contributor on 2 October 2026: his working method with Fred Milgrom and a 4-track; it says nothing about Fist II itself.
• Helen Stuckey's PhD thesis (Flinders, 2016), given by the contributor on 2 October 2026: Bill McIntosh's trapdoor and nine warriors (trapdoor confirmed in room 76, $0659/$0660; warriors not found, no horde record in $E609); Barnett as Beam's Commodore expert; the Tsumea interview by Souri dated 2014. Its story of a hidden figure in Fist II's shrubbery is about the Spectrum version and was left out.

How the analysed state was reached

How to get from the contributor's own copy to the analysed state. Someone else must be able to follow this exactly.

The image

exploding_fist_2.d64, 174,848 bytes, SHA-256 d61d133d231b6453d4c409f0ff8d058771493b9030384a7d1c67758fee873b54. A standard 35-track disk with no disk name. It shows a Mindscape logo, so it is the Mindscape release (as "Fist: The Legend Continues" in the US; the in-game title reads FIST, THE LEGEND CONTINUES, COPYRIGHT 1986 BEAM SOFTWARE). No crack intro or trainer appears. The directory holds twenty files:

Two more copies compared

On 2 October 2026 the contributor supplied two GCR images of the Mindscape disk: fist_the_legend_continuesmindscape_1986.g64 (SHA-256 87ad649d2d08ff86431e15f3349a050b4ebc556835c2c9d3262b02fc18ad547e) and ...1986alt.g64 (SHA-256 7a80f5e037734d178b3b3359b74658bbbd7bb69134a5c0a2db16044c18b83771). Both decode to 35 standard tracks with every sector's checksum good, and both directories (disk name fist) list the same twenty files with no TITLE. Nineteen files are byte for byte the same in the two; BNK12A, BNK2B and BNK3 also match the analysed load at $0400, $5C00 and $8000 exactly.

The one file that differs is LL, the menu, in 268 bytes at $9866-$9971:

• In the first image that block is code that decrypts itself (a running EOR that starts from $C6), copies a routine to $033F, sends the drive a program with M-W and starts it with M-E. The drive program reads track 2, sector 0, a sector no file owns (the BAM marks it used), and the menu then fetches 256 bytes back from the drive's memory with M-R into $9866 and jumps there. So the menu's own code comes from the drive, after the drive has read the disk: a copy protection check. The rest of track 2 (only sector 7 belongs to a file), and sectors on tracks 18, 33, 34 and 35 that no file uses, hold data, and a 36th track carries five sync marks and no sectors.
• In the alt image the same block is plain code (SETLFS, SETNAM, LOAD of the logo and the next file), written straight into the file. Track 2 and the unused sectors are zeroed and tracks 36-41 are blank. It is the disk with the protection removed.

Neither image is the .d64 analysed here (its SHA-256 differs and it has no disk name); its game files were not compared with these byte for byte beyond the three above.

From power-on to play

1. Hard reset (power cycle) the emulator, PAL.
2. Autostart the disk. VICE loads the first file, L.
3. A "Please wait - Loading..." line, the Mindscape logo, then the menu. Snapshot work/f2-menu.vsf there.
4. Press 2 (Adventure). The title picture stays up while the loader reads six files through the KERNAL; warp mode makes this take seconds.
5. The loader ends with JMP $C3FD. work/f2-entry.vsf is stopped there (a stopping checkpoint on $C3FD set from the menu snapshot).
6. Play starts at once, with no attract mode: the hero in a jungle. work/f2-play.vsf is a few seconds in, no input.

Steady state

$01 = $15 in play: I/O visible, RAM everywhere else. The hardware vectors are the game's: IRQ $FFFE = $3B43, NMI $FFFA = $3C23, reset $FFFC = $39BF. Program-counter samples fall in $2000-$22xx, $3F67-$3F91 and $F5F9. The game runs $C400 once at the hand-over and then JMP $0402.

The Adventure is one load: nothing is read from disk once play has started. Training is a separate load of its own files.

Emulator

release v3.13.1, v3.13.1-linux-x86_64-gui.zip, Linux x86_64 in a cloud container with no display. check-emulator: 56 of 57, failed pause-at-instruction.

The loader, in a paragraph

LOADALL ($C000) loads TITLE and TSETUP and calls $1000 to show the title picture. It then loads BNK4B at $1000 and, with every ROM and the I/O switched out ($01 = 0), copies $1000-$3FF8 up to $D000-$FFF8, under the I/O area and the KERNAL. It loads BNK4A at $C280-$CFFF (over the end of the loader itself), BNK3 at $1000 and copies it to $8000-$BFFF, BNK12A at $0400-$5BFF, COLOR at $6000 copied into colour RAM, and BNK2B at $5C00-$7FFF. Then it switches everything out again and jumps to $C3FD. The game fills all of memory from $0400 to $FFF8, the RAM under the I/O chips included.

The symbol map for this game is symbols.json; the listing behind the Source tab is listing.json. Write-ups, facts and symbol maps are CC BY-SA 4.0. The game itself is not hosted here.