apidya lost bonus level uncovered
amiga, apidya, featured, games, retro, whdload February 17th, 2008Sixteen years after Apidya was first released, KillerGorilla and I have uncovered an entire bonus round on level 4 that has not been seen until now !
KillerGorilla from the English Amiga Board (a top Amiga forum I am a member of) had contacted me regarding the one tune on the in-built sound test menu that he couldn’t find in the game. His theory was that the tune – “Speed Of Light” – belonged to a bonus round somewhere on level 4 as it was a subtune of the main level 4 track, but he’d been unable to find the entry point to the bonus round anywhere on the level. He asked if I could look for it as I’d been “delving into” the game code while working on the previous releases of my WHDLoad patch for Apidya. So I fired up MonAm and went on a little archaeology trip…
The following are extracts from my messages to KillerGorilla during the evening of the 15th February 2008, which I think tell the story quite well:
19:06: You might however be on to something with notion of there being an undiscovered subgame in level 4. I just checked and level 4 contains a (single) jump to outside the normal game code area, looking kinda similarish to the other “start the subgame” jumps in the other levels.
22:53: Bloody ‘ell, you were right. I patched level 4 to take the Mystery Jump Of Doom and … lo … a new subgame was found ! It uses your mystery tune and the title “speed of light” suits the gameplay: you fly through a cavern and the scrolling gradually increases to ludicrous speed until you hit a wall. I have a screenshot and gameplay video to prove it exists! Now I just need to decipher the data structure the jump routine is linked from (looks like a bunch of coordinates at first glance) to see how to get to it from normal gameplay. Nice one !
01:52: There is a bug in a data table in level 4 that would prevent the “speed of light” subgame from ever starting. Two values were swapped which essentially said “move along, nothing to see here” even if you were at the right location to trigger the game.
Unfortunately, my initial 01:52 diagnosis above of the game having a bug preventing entry to the Speed Of Light round proved to be incorrect. Cut me some slack, it was made at 2am after all !
I had tracked down the original developer of Apidya, Peter Thierolf, and informed him of our discovery. After some discussion, an examination of the original source code that Peter still had and a comparison of that source code to the released binary, we realised that the game wasn’t actually bugged as I had thought. The subgame was simply very well hidden (until now) and very difficult to get into.
However, my examination of the code and data tables had revealed the entry point to the Speed Of Light round, which was previously unknown. Furthermore, a small bug was found to exist which prevents entry to the round if the player is in “flashing invulnerable” mode, but this is unlikely to affect many players.
Below are some screenshots of the newly discovered Speed Of Light bonus round taken with WinUAE:
 Entry point to Apidya Speed Of Light bonus round |
 Apidya Speed Of Light bonus round |
 Apidya Speed Of Light bonus round |
The footage below is an example run-through of the new level. This is a recording of the first time I got the level to start properly and is (I guess) the first time it had been seen by anyone since 1992! The same footage can also be found here on YouTube.
Big thanks and multiple high-fives must surely go to the (very observant) KillerGorilla for spotting the missing tune and putting me on the scent in the first place.
John Girvin is a software engineer, sci-fi buff, cyclist and retrocomputer fan (ie: nerd) from Belfast, Northern Ireland.
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February 18th, 2008 at 6:11 pm
incredible! nice work!!
February 19th, 2008 at 12:28 pm
Sexy time high five! You should put your bug fixing talents to use in the IT industry
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February 20th, 2008 at 6:21 am
If you like your hidden bits and pieces then you might be interested in an Article I read back in the day on Amiga Power. It was an interview with Bullfrog I think, they made a terminally cool platform game called Flood. Peter Molyneux didn’t like the game as it was coded badly, he went on to say that the game was planned so poorly that there was code for bad guys – sprites and movement etc, but they were never introduced into the game…
February 22nd, 2008 at 5:03 pm
Mr. John Girvin, I have another project for you… I recently discovered that Magic Pockets had 2 versions, US and UK. US version was released a year later and they changed the level 1 to an all new level, they moved the UK level 1 to level 3 and removed the UK level 3 altogether… Any chance you might want to make a hack where the US level 1 is tacked onto the UK’s original first 5 as (e.g. as a level Zero) so a complete MP game can be at long last released?
February 22nd, 2008 at 10:10 pm
Congrats, nice find. Looks tough too.
June 11th, 2008 at 1:29 am
I remember when I was younger seeing “Speed Of Light” on the music test but not knowing what level it corresponded to. Without the technical knowhow I was unable to ever find out until I read this page. Sir, you rule!
August 13th, 2008 at 7:20 pm
Remember being 13, just bought Apidya, completed it in no time and of course found this bonus level. Can’t believe I was the only one…
August 13th, 2008 at 8:48 pm
Last_Inquisitor, you are the first and only person I have heard from to say they have seen this level before. You must have been one of very few able to get this far into the game without using trainers. Well done on finding it unaided!
September 24th, 2008 at 11:25 pm
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October 21st, 2008 at 9:03 pm
at Last_Inquisitor, you wasn’t the only one. I also remember this level. I played this game perhaps more than 100 times.
October 21st, 2008 at 10:43 pm
Congrats FD, that makes two!
November 5th, 2008 at 5:48 pm
[...] del 2008, di un livello bonus nel gioco originale rimasto inesplorato per ben 16 anni ! Qui trovate l’articolo a riguardo. Una bella occasione per rigiocare sotto windows (quindi senza bisogno di emulatori) un classico [...]
March 18th, 2009 at 4:18 pm
Apidya is a great Amiga classic, a new level is very funny for Ami-fans!
October 8th, 2009 at 9:12 pm
I also found the secret level. It was widely known at my school and everyone used it. A friend told me too.
So WTF is this some kind of accomplishment?!
October 9th, 2009 at 8:51 am
Wow, your school must have been filled with awesome Apidya players!
I’ve been around Amiga circles for some time and there was a genuine mystery as to where the “Speed Of Light” tune shown in the sound test was used in the game, so knowledge of the subgame clearly wasn’t as widespread generally as it was at your school.
When I started digging into the game, making a new WHDLoad patch, I found the subgame myself. On first inspection it looked like it was unreachable through normal play because of a bug in the level data, giving a plausible explanation as to why no-one (to my knowledge at that point) had found the subgame before.
Later, after discussions with Apidya’s programmer Peter Theirolf, this turned out not to be the case. What was actually happening was a bug in the common implementation of the invulnerability trainer was preventing entry to the Speed Of Light level. It was definitely reachable through normal play (as you and some others discovered), but most players weren’t good enough to get that far in the game and discover the entrance for themselves. This is why it had remained a “secret” until now.
But as you say, and as some of the comments to this post have demonstrated, there really was no secret at all, just a lot of people using a broken trainer.
Did you read the whole post? This is all already explained above.
Still, congratulations to you, Another One, for finding Speed Of Light yourself.
June 22nd, 2010 at 1:25 am
Basically that would mean wherever “only” the original version (without buggy trainer) arrived, the people just played it and so had a higher chance of discovering this extra level. On the other hand I saw it quite some times that games where widely accepted as being “too hard” once a version with trainer was available. Apydia *being* a hard game, it is certainly understandable that versions without trainer didn’t spread very far.