08/20/08: Map of the whole Death Trap maze! And a 3d version! by Starxxon, | Category: GAMES | 3 COMMENTS - (Comments are closed) Some of you may remember Death Trap, a game where you drive a tank (that can’t even shoot!) around a huge maze full of power-ups, represented by letters. You were also chased by some homing mine that would warp you randomly after blowing up your tank. [url]http://nitros9.lcurtisboyle.com/deathtrap.html[/url] [img:d0998dc186]http://nitros9.lcurtisboyle.com/death_trap.gif[/img:d0998dc186] Through the use of the “M” powerups you encounter at specific points in the maze, you can get an over-head map from there, but the view is nowhere big enough to ever show the whole thing. I’m sure I’m not the only one that wondered what the whole maze would look like… Since I’m good at reverse-engineering video-games (having cracked the level format for F-Zero, Starfox and Super Mario 64) I decided to give it a try. The .bin version is 8k, which is way to small to contain the whole map uncompressed, so I took a look at a game disk I found somewhere on the net (JOGOS3.DSK) which contained the game. Here’s what I found in there: [img:d0998dc186]http://homepage.mac.com/qubedstudios/dt_map_raw.png[/img:d0998dc186] It looked familiar, but no matter what codec I used to decode the image I still didn’t get the actual map. What I found is that the bitmap on the top is for horizontal walls, while the one on the bottom is for vertical walls. With that in mind, I combined the two bitmaps to get this: [img:d0998dc186]http://homepage.mac.com/qubedstudios/dt_map_2d.png[/img:d0998dc186] Nice isn’t it? Each corner of the map brings a lot of memories to me! If you use a paint bucket tool on a white area of the map you’ll find that the tank can actually go anywhere in the maze without using a warp, except the D of the word END, the squares and three triangles made by the “S” figure at the bottom left of the map. Another big exception is that big area on the top right of the map, which is disconnected from the rest of the maze. I used to call this area “the desert”, because of the wavy pattern made by walls, and the fact that you would “starve” out of fuel in the longest diagonal stretches. Looking at the area in the context of the whole map shows that it was probably indeed intended as a desert-like area, with a pyramid in the center. Looking at the text found in the game data, it seems that it’s possible to actually finish the game. I’m not sure if it requires getting every single power-ups, or maybe just all the diamonds. Nevertheless, at least one diamond is trapped inside a square, so you have to be extremely lucky and get warped inside that square to get this particular diamond (then wait for the homing mine to get warped elsewhere!) Now, wouldn’t be cool to have a 3d remake of Death Trap? I still have to find where and how the power-up positions are stored, but here’s a glimpse of how it could look: [img:d0998dc186]http://homepage.mac.com/qubedstudios/dt_map_part1.jpg[/img:d0998dc186] [img:d0998dc186]http://homepage.mac.com/qubedstudios/dt_map_part2.jpg[/img:d0998dc186] [img:d0998dc186]http://homepage.mac.com/qubedstudios/dt_map_small.gif[/img:d0998dc186] Click on the following link to get a bigger version of the 3d map: [url]http://homepage.mac.com/qubedstudios/dt_map_big.png[/url]