1985 · Melbourne House

About this page

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 (3 commits)
• chunkypixel (2 commits)
• Gregg Barnett — design and programming
• David Johnston — programming
• Greg Holland — graphics
• Neil Brennan — music

Other places to love this game

• The Way of the Exploding Fist – C64-Wiki
• The Way of the Exploding Fist manual – Lemon64

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 2 October 2026 this session's network refused every page fetch (C64-Wiki, the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine and search, Wikipedia: HTTP 403 from the proxy). What is below from the web comes from web search result summaries, read the same day, of these pages: C64-Wiki, https://www.c64-wiki.com/wiki/The_Way_of_the_Exploding_Fist; Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Way_of_the_Exploding_Fist; Lemon64's manual page, https://www.lemon64.com/doc/way-of-the-exploding-fist/665; the World of Spectrum inlay (a Spectrum document); https://frgcb.blogspot.com/2021/01/the-way-of-exploding-fist-melbourne.html. They are second-hand: leads, weaker than a page.
• Credits, from those summaries: designed by Gregg Barnett, written by Beam Software, programming by Gregg Barnett and David Johnston, graphics by Greg Holland, music by Neil Brennan; published by Melbourne House, June 1985. The game carries no credits of its own.
• The game's own screens in the emulator, 2 October 2026 (reference/), and the code (facts.md).

Features

Beyond the documentation

Found in the code, not in the manual.

• Holding fire at the end of a one-player game skips the high-score table and leaves the new entry named ...... ($1472).
• A trap: if CIA 2's timer A is running when a blow scores, the game crashes ($2CAE; live).
• Past tenth dan the opponent's level is chosen at random from 7 to 10 while the rank still reads 10TH DAN ($1C65).
• The one-bit speech player toggles the SID's master volume, so every shout is played through the volume register while the music runs.

Open questions

• m.tsound (5,632 bytes) and m.spchtbl (768) are not in the game's memory as they stand on disk (searched in 16-byte pieces in both snapshots); they may be the loader's shout, not checked.
• Why blow_reaction tests CIA 2's timer A ($2CAE) is not known.
• Gaps of exactly $15 lines between the fighters' tops ask two row changes of the same raster line ($32EA, $32FD); whether a row then shows a frame late was not tested.

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 emulator

release v3.13.1, v3.13.1-linux-x86_64-gui.zip (vice-mcp), on Linux x86_64 with no display (run under xvfb-run by the launcher), 2 October

1. check-emulator: 56 of 57 passed; the one failure is

pause-at-instruction, so every stop is made with pause() in kit/c64/vice.py, never vice_execution_pause alone. PAL (6569 VIC-II), 6581 SID. VICE's default drive settings (true drive emulation) load the image; no vicerc was written.

The image

way_of_the_exploding_fistmelbourne_house_1985pal.g64, 317,884 bytes. The header reads GCR-1541, version 0, 84 half-track slots (42 tracks), so it is a GCR image of a disk, not a sector image. Disk name melbourne house, id disk!. The directory, as c1541 (from the emulator build) lists it:

The load addresses in the files' headers overlap, so the loader places them itself. Searching the snapshots for each file's bytes says where they end up (16-byte pieces, then a byte-for-byte count at the best offset):

is the Melbourne House release: the menu reads Melbourne House presents and offers one game, with no trainer or crack text anywhere on it.

From power-on to play

1. Hard reset (vice_machine_reset, mode: "hard"), make sure the machine is running, and autostart the image (vice_autostart with the path; VICE loads *, which is menu). Turn warp on to save time.
2. The Melbourne House menu appears within about four minutes of warp on this host: 1. --> exploding fist / press the appropriate key (reference/menu.png). Saved as work/menu_clean.vsf.
3. Press 1 (vice_keyboard_matrix, key 1, held a second). The game files load; about 16 seconds in warp (two minutes at normal speed) later the loader enters the game through BASIC's SYS (the return address on the stack is $E146, inside BASIC's SYS handler), at $1AED: JSR $18E8 (machine set-up) / JMP $1EE1. A stopping checkpoint at $1AED armed before the key press catches it: work/entry.vsf, the hand-over, $01 = $36 there.
4. Turn warp off and run. The attract mode starts: the fighters spar on their own under DEMO / JOYSTICK 1 PLAYER (reference/demo.png).
5. Press fire on joystick port 2 (vice_joystick_set, port 2, held 0.6 s). NOVICE / 1 PLAYER replaces DEMO and the bout begins, timer at
6. Wait 1.2 s and save on the running machine: work/play_round1.vsf, the start of the first bout, both fighters standing (reference/play-novice-bout1.png). This is the snapshot the disassembler and the listing are built from.

Left idle, the computer opponent wins the bout in a few seconds and the game returns to the attract mode, so a play snapshot has to be taken straight after the fire press.

Hand-over or play snapshot

work/entry.vsf and work/play_round1.vsf agree byte for byte except in these ranges: zero page, the stack, $0200-$03FF, a few bytes in $0A00-$3EFF (variables), $C000-$C9FF, $CC00-$CFFF, $E600-$E7FF (55 bytes) and $FF00. At the hand-over $C000-$C7FF holds the menu's own code (it begins JSR $C386 / JSR $C4D2 and carries DEL - SOUND EFFECTS ON/OFF), $0200 holds leftover text (1, C, NG FIST) and $0300 the vectors; in play the game has replaced the first two with its own data and zeroed the third. None of the game's code exists only at the hand-over, so the play snapshot is the image: it holds the data the game builds for itself.

Steady state

Recorded with kit/c64/frame.py capture (work/frame-play.json) a few seconds after play_round1.vsf was saved, and by reading the vectors in the attract mode:

• $01 = $15 (bits 0-2 %101: RAM at $A000 and $E000, I/O at $D000), set at $1956. The KERNAL is banked out and the game owns the hardware vectors: NMI $2FF2, RESET $1990, IRQ chained (below). The RAM vectors at $0314 are zero in play.
• Seven raster interrupts per frame, each writing the next one's address into $FFFE: $2FB0 (line 0), $2D62 (line 90), $2F02 (160), $2E11 (181), $2FFF (202), $30E5 (218), $31F2 (255). The ones from line 160 on move sprites down the screen and change their pointers (sprite multiplexing). Line 90 sets $D011 to $3B (bitmap mode) and $D021; line 255 sets it back to $1B (text) for the score panel at the top.
• VIC bank 3 ($C000-$FFFF): screen at $CC00, sprite pointers at $CFF8, $D018 = $39 in the text band.
• Nothing has yet been seen to load from disk after the hand-over; whether the game reads the disk again (for another backdrop, say) is open and is checked in 20-features.

The loader, in a paragraph

menu is a short boot file that loads over the BASIC vectors so that it starts itself as soon as autostart has loaded it, prints its welcome text and loads the Melbourne House menu program, which sits at $C000-$C7FF at the hand-over. The menu offers the one game, and on 1 loads the m.* files and starts the game through BASIC with SYS 6893 ($1AED). The disk is a GCR image, but no loading failure or protection check was seen under VICE's true drive emulation; the loader's code was not read further, by policy.

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.