Five worlds the menu cannot reach

Ten worlds of four, not five worlds of eight

This is easy to get wrong, and two other projects did. The caves are not twenty shipped followed by twenty hidden: the two sets alternate, four at a time, because the 1988 release appended five worlds to a file that already held five, then re-picked which five the menu offered.

The 1987 and 1988 columns are the PC releases. The menu's five entries map to raw worlds 0, 2, 4, 6 and 8, and a cave sits at raw world * 4 + stage, so only caves 0-3, 8-11, 16-19, 24-27 and 32-35 can be reached.

How the order is known rather than guessed

The executable holds a table of ten pointers to tileset filenames, indexed by the raw world:

129d7: mov si,WORD PTR ds:0x2c92   ; the raw world
129db: mov bx,0x267a
129de: shl si,1
129e0: mov dx,WORD PTR [bx+si]     ; "HUNTER.SCM", "SCUBA.SCM", ...

That is the world order, stated by the program itself. The treasure names work the same way: ten names in fixed eight-byte fields, right-aligned and null-padded, and the heads-up display picks one with the same index:

fee7: mov si,0x1c81
feea: mov ax,ds:0x2c92
feed: shl ax,1
feef: shl ax,1
fef1: shl ax,1                     ; raw world * 8
fef3: add si,ax

Together they fix the pairing in the table above by index, with nothing left to infer from the order the strings happen to sit in. The question had been open since at least 2006: the best-known writeup on the game says nobody knows which collectible goes with which missing theme, and guesses four of the ten.

What the first PC release settles

The first DOS release, dated 9 November 1987, carries five tilesets and five sets of cartoons: hunter, scuba, cook, player and cowboy. Its cave file is 17,600 bytes, twenty caves where the 1988 file has forty in 35,200, and they are byte for byte the first twenty of the 1988 file.

Those five were raw worlds 0 to 4, all reachable from a typed prompt that reads Enter world 1-5. In 1988 the caves for music, space, luck, body and miner were appended, and a new picture menu was pointed at every other world. That brought in space and body and took out scuba and player.

So the five hidden worlds are of two kinds, which this page used to treat as one:

• Scuba and player were withdrawn. They shipped, and people played them.
• Music, luck and miner were never on the menu of any home release. None carries first-party art for them, and no PC, Amiga, Atari ST or Amstrad CPC disk read here has a tile for them. Each has a filename, a treasure name, a palette and four caves. Luck was drawn at least once: a screenshot on the back of the Atari ST box, taken from an Amiga version, shows it.

This retires a theory, held here and elsewhere, that the interleave hid content on purpose. It is the arithmetic of adding five worlds to five and choosing again.

Sold as ten worlds in 1987

Rockford started in the arcade. Arcadia Systems made it in 1987 for its Amiga-based board, and Icon Design and Synergistic Software converted it for the Amiga and the PC. The arcade game has never been dumped, so what it held comes from the 1987 press, which describes a bigger game than the one that came home.

Zzap!64's photographs are the only image of the music world found anywhere. This coverage is the first dated, public evidence that the hidden worlds were real arcade worlds, with music, scuba, a miner and a gambler named among them. By spring 1988 every home review says five worlds, and so does the manual. The counts do not all agree: C+VG and arcade-history.com both give nine scenarios of five levels, which no home version has.

The two photographs against the tiles

Both builds draw music and scuba from Aleksi Sahala's tile sheets, the faithful build as they are and VIP redrawn at eight to one. On 12 October 2026 the two photographs were set beside both, tile by tile, by eye. They are camera shots of a screen and the Zzap!64 pair has a strong brown cast, so the shapes are good evidence and the colours weak. Only the level card and the scuba shot have colours that look plausible.

The shapes agree; the colours and the player do not. The colour gap is what you would expect between an Amiga-based arcade machine and art drawn to the PC's EGA palettes, which lost colours in the conversion (see below). No palette turns a diver into an octopus, though, so scuba's player may have been a different design on the arcade. That is a guess from two photographs.

No art was changed. None of the differences is a fault of the kind this project corrects, a tile that disagrees with the sheet it was drawn from, and two blurred camera shots are a poor thing to redraw towards. Redrawing VIP towards a magazine photograph would also bring in a third source with its own rights question. If the colours are ever moved towards the arcade's, the clearest cases are scuba's shells, dirt, walls and gems, and music's notes.

What each version carries

Every version that could be read was searched for the five. The C64 and Atari 8-bit could not be.

The Amiga disks

The two Amiga disks read, the Melbourne House release and a crack, agree byte for byte on every data file they share. The cave file, maps, is the PC's CELLMAPS.BIN with all forty caves, but art exists for five worlds only, tile sheets in LEV/ and cartoons in ANI/. An ANI/ file is 24 frames of 48 by 48 in four rows labelled NEW, WIN, LOSE and TIME, for a level starting, being won, being lost and running out of time. The PC's .CAR files hold the same sheet. No hidden world has either file.

The Amiga game file

The game program on the Melbourne House disk, rf, is 26,332 bytes of 68000 code and data. It was decompiled here on 11 October 2026, read from the disassembly and not run, and it is written for ten worlds:

• It loads any of the ten by number from a name table in the PC's raw-world order, under the Amiga's own names: lev/cond for the conductor, lev/gamb for the gambler, lev/mine for the miner.
• For the world it loads, it reads four 32-colour palettes from cols and four caves from maps.
• Its menu maps a choice to a world through five words, 0, 2, 4, 6, 8, where the PC keeps ten, 0, 2, 4, 6, 8, 1, 3, 5, 7, 9. On the Amiga a hidden world cannot be chosen at all.
• A missing world file hangs it. The error path flips the background between yellow and grey for ever, and no path skips a world whose files are absent.
• Every world has a fifth level, imap, the tileset showcase Sahala described: one 880-byte cave with a sample of most tile types.

What is missing is five pairs of files and five menu entries. That fits a set that was cut or unfinished, but it does not show whether those files ever existed.

Quotas and times

rf also holds a treasure quota and a time limit for every cave of all ten worlds. Against the PC's, the worlds the Amiga shipped differ in a few caves, scuba matches exactly, and four of the hidden worlds look unfinished:

Miner gets 140 seconds in all four caves and luck 140 in three, and a value not yet identified is 45 in every cave of the last five worlds. They look like defaults nobody had tuned, which is an inference and not something the file says. The PC's numbers are the tuned ones: it gives miner's fourth cave a quota of one jewel, where the Amiga asks for 30.

The Atari ST's luck cave

The ST keeps twenty caves at the end of its DATA.D, in the PC's cell format: mostly the PC's, some altered and some in a different order. Its third body cave is luck's fourth, byte for byte, and its fourth body cave is the PC's third, so one luck cave reached the shops dressed as body. The first copy read here was a crack, but TOSEC's dump of the original disk holds the same caves, so the swap is in the released game.

Every cave change that Sahala's README lists for the C64 and Atari 8-bit releases is on this ST disk, although the README says the ST does not have them.

The Amstrad CPC

The CPC disk read here is a cracked trainer disk. Its cave format is not decoded, so its layouts were not compared, but its twenty treasure quotas can be read, aligned by eye: 14 match the PC and six differ, in hunter 4, cowboy 4, space 1 and body 1, 2 and 4. The set is neither the PC's nor the ST's, and it adds nothing on the hidden worlds.

The C64 and Atari 8-bit

Sahala says these releases use luck's fourth cave as body's third, as the ST does. An attempt on 12 October 2026 to check this in the 8-bit data did not get that far. Both C64 images are cracks packed in four layers, with the game behind the crackers' trainer menu in the fourth, which was not reached. The Atari 8-bit image has its own boot loader and is packed the same way. The ST original already shows that a luck cave was released.

The manual and the boxes

One manual served the Amiga, Atari ST, Atari 8-bit, PC and C64, with loading instructions for each. It describes five worlds of four levels, "the sixteen screens that makes up a world", and says nothing about extra worlds, a second disk or a bonus. A level is four screens, which is how ACE counted eighty. The ST box back says "four levels on each of five different worlds". A second box back, with a fish and an octopus doodled on it, was used on the PC box and on an Amiga box distributed by Electronic Arts. It says five worlds too, so the doodles are decoration and say nothing about scuba.

Their colours are still in there

A palette in this game is a seventeen-byte block: sixteen palette registers and the overscan byte, handed to the BIOS in one call. The blocks sit end to end in the EGA executable, a black fade and two title palettes first, then the ten worlds from 0x040A4 in raw world order.

Here are all ten as the hardware would have shown them. An asterisk marks the five worlds the 1988 menu cannot reach.

Scuba opens on blue and carries a cyan. Miner is the darkest of the ten and spends half its entries on greys. Scuba's palette can be checked against art, in the 1987 release and in the C+VG photograph. Miner's cannot: no picture of miner has been found, and its palettes are the only trace of how it was meant to look.

Which palette belongs to which world

The ordering came from prior art; the check is this project's. Decode a world's EGA sheet and its VGA sheet, map each EGA index to the VGA colour it most often coincides with, then rank all fourteen candidate blocks against that mapping. Each of the five shipped worlds picks its own palette, five out of five. An earlier attempt here failed and was abandoned. The table was fine, but cook was being coloured with scuba's palette because the interleave was unknown.

What the EGA conversion lost

These are not the original colours. The PC's ten blocks use only 8 to 13 distinct colours in their sixteen registers: body has 8, cook 9, and player, music and luck 10. The Amiga's palettes for the same worlds hold 28 to 32 distinct colours out of 32. On the fixed EGA set distinct Amiga colours merged, and body and cook lost the most. Sahala said so first, and the counts here bear him out. The VGA release, with its own palettes, is closer.

The Amiga's colours

The Amiga disk's cols file is 2,560 bytes: forty palettes of 32 colours in the Amiga's 12-bit format, four to a world, for all ten worlds in cave order. rf reads them by world number, which settles the layout from the code. So music, luck and miner have their Amiga colours too. They show what those worlds looked like, not how they were drawn. The luck screenshot on the ST box fits, with black empty cells where luck's PC block says blue. The faithful build keeps the PC palette for luck, as it does for every world.

Ten figures nothing draws

Every shipped sprite sheet has a row of ten figures, sixteen pixels by thirty-two, at y = 144, which the game never draws. The player animation it does use is the twenty poses at y = 48, so these are something else: ten figures for ten worlds.

Nothing points at them. A sprite table entry is a planar byte offset, y * 40 + b, so the row's ten origins are the words 5760 to 5778. Neither unpacked executable holds a run of them, and the only table that reaches the row covers its right-hand end, which is art the game does use. That the shipped code cannot reach them is exactly what makes them placeholders.

Which figure is which world

Five of the ten can be settled without reading the art at all. Each sheet's real player was matched against all ten figures by silhouette overlap and exact pixel agreement, and in every one of the five sheets the best match is that sheet's own world. That fixes positions 1, 2, 3, 6 and 9, and shows the row is not in raw world order, which is the assumption to reach for first.

Until 25 September 2026 this table read 4, 7 and 8 as miner, luck and player, taking a football helmet's studs and face guard for a miner's helmet and beard, and a lamp for a clover. The earlier remake project had them right. Its reading is the one above, which agrees with all five matched positions and is backed by the Amiga's own list of worlds and collectibles.

What a palette cannot recover

It would be neat if these were one block of art that each world coloured with its own palette, so the five unreachable worlds could be shown in their own colours. They are not. Between any two sheets the same figure differs on 41 to 47 per cent of its colour indices while its silhouette differs on about three. Each sheet holds its own coloured copy of the whole cast, so a world's palette on a figure from another world's sheet is a recolour, not a recovery.

The EGA SPACE.FIL lacks them entirely, with two non-zero pixels in that row where the other EGA sheets have around 2,490. The VGA SPACE.SCM carries all ten.

Why they were cut

No first-hand account of the decision has been found. Three accounts reach this project through Aleksi Sahala, all second-hand and none checked here:

• In 2006 a former Mastertronic employee, who had not worked on Rockford, told him the extra worlds were meant for future content and that the company wanted a true sequel instead. That was the person's own theory, and it is where the cancelled add-on story comes from.
• In 2025 Simon Plumbe, of the Mastertronic collectors' archive, suggested they were cut for quality, and so that the 8-bit and 16-bit releases carried the same game when ten worlds and forty caves would not fit on 8-bit media. He also suggested they might be the original five, replaced, or kept for a developer version.
• Sahala himself now favours a cut. Having seen the 1987 PC sheets, he thinks they look unfinished.

The evidence here leans towards a cut. The arcade game had ten worlds in 1987 and every home version had five by spring 1988, which is what Plumbe describes. Scuba and player were not held back for later; they shipped on the PC and were taken out. Brian Beuken, credited with the Amstrad CPC version, writes on his own site that "There were 10 themes each with 4 levels, split over 2 games". His is the only statement from someone who worked on a version to say ten themes, and the CPC disk read here shows no second game.

For music, luck and miner nothing settles it. Every version with their caves has their names, treasures and palettes too, and one luck cave shipped on the ST. On the PC each of their caves has a treasure quota and time limit set one by one, where the Amiga's look like defaults.

Reaching them

After all the work elsewhere on this site, the patch is almost funny: delete the first four caves from the cave file, and every hidden world shifts into a playable slot. The quotas and time limits need shifting to match, which is a block copy in a hex editor. The technique is not ours. It was worked out and published in 2006, and asahala/Rockford-Patcher automates it, as described here. The cave file is not offered here as a download, so there is nothing on this page to patch.

In the faithful build

This project patches nothing. The faithful build reads all ten entries of the menu map at ds:0x26F2 (the second half, 1, 3, 5, 7, 9, is the five worlds the 1988 menu skips) and lays them out as a second page of the same select screen. All five are drawn with Aleksi Sahala's art, used unchanged and with his palettes: the tilesets and select-screen portraits from asahala/Rockford-Patcher, which he reconstructed from the placeholder figures, the palettes and the ST box photographs. They are his drawings, not the game's. Scuba and player do have originals, in the 1987 release, but his are used so that the page is one artist's set. His art has no cartoons, so these worlds play without them.

His repository carries no licence. He was told on 29 September 2026, and on 7 October he agreed to this use, on condition of credit and a link to his repository. The tiles come down if he asks.

In VIP

VIP, the enhanced build, has all five hidden worlds too, on a second select page of its own. Its tiles and portraits were generated through an image model from Sahala's, so they are derived from his work and credited to him by name, on the terms of his agreement of 7 October: use of his tilesets, with credit and a link to his repository. Each hidden world fills all 139 positions the renderer can reach, as each 1988 world does, and has no cartoons. The VIP page says how they were drawn.

Seeing them without playing

The caves page draws all forty caves whole, with the twenty hidden ones from scuba on. The sprites page shows every object in two strips, the 1988 worlds above and the hidden five below. Both use VIP's tiles.