GUNFIGHTER — CU Amiga 1994

00 Dedication

To whoever made Gunfighter. You shipped a two-player clay animation duel on a floppy disk given away free with a magazine, and thirty years later it's still the kind of game that makes you call your mate over and say you have to play this. That matters more than you probably know. This rebuild exists because of that.

— Hylas, Devon · 2025

Coverdisk games occupy a peculiar place in gaming history. They weren't commercial releases and they weren't demos — they were gifts, tucked inside the plastic wallet of a magazine, found on a Saturday morning and played for the rest of the weekend. Most of them are simply gone now, unarchived, because nobody thought a free gift was worth preserving.

Gunfighter survived. Barely. And it deserved more than survival — it deserved to be played again, by anyone, on any machine, without hunting down an Amiga.

01 The original game

CU AMIGA, 1994

1994

Cover date

Players

Clay

Animation style

AMOS

Built with

1 disk

Everything on it

What it was

A one-screen two-player pistol duel. Two gunslingers face each other at opposite ends of the screen. A count. A draw. Shoot first or die — and if you die, you die expressively, in a chunky, physical, unmistakably hand-made clay animation that lasts just long enough to sting.

Simple enough to explain in ten seconds. Compelling enough to argue about for the next hour.

The clay characters

The characters were real clay models — physically sculpted, posed, photographed frame by frame, then digitised into the game. At a time when every coverdisk game used pixel art, Gunfighter had actual stop-motion animation with physical weight and texture to it.

The death sequences in particular. Chunky. Absurd. You kept losing on purpose just to see them again.

AMOS Professional

Written in AMOS Professional — a BASIC-derived language with built-in sprite and sound handling that made the Amiga's custom chips approachable. The game is lean and purposeful. Every byte on that disk had to earn its place.

The sprite offset tables baked into the executable would, thirty years later, become the key to extracting everything intact.

The coverdisk era

CU Amiga, Amiga Format, The One — each shipped monthly coverdisks through the early nineties. For many readers these were the only games they could regularly afford. An entire subculture of Amiga gaming exists only on those disks. Most of it has never been catalogued. Some of it, like Gunfighter, very nearly wasn't.

02 The recovery

HOW IT CAME BACK

The ADF held everything.
The question was reading it.

An Amiga Disk Format image is a sector-by-sector copy of the original floppy — every file, every byte, exactly as it was pressed. The challenge is that reading one properly means understanding the Amiga filesystem, the AMOS sprite format, and the specific way this particular game was structured.

RetroCompat's Amiga preservation tools were built around exactly this kind of problem.

Step one — ADF extraction

Reading the disk

The coverdisk ADF was loaded and processed. The Amiga OFS filesystem was parsed, sector checksums validated, and every file extracted to flat storage. The Gunfighter executable, all sprite data, and the audio samples came out intact — thirty years of magnetic oxide, still holding.

Step two — sprite analysis

The AMOS offset tables

AMOS Professional stores sprite animations with explicit pixel offset tables — per-frame x/y adjustments that define where each frame's visual centre sits relative to its collision point. Without these, the clay characters play at the wrong positions: sliding, jumping, completely detached from where they should be standing. The offset tables were parsed directly from the binary and reconstructed for every animation state — walk, idle, draw, shoot, and the death sequences.

Step three — verification

Frame by frame against the original

Every sprite was cross-checked against the game running in WinUAE emulation. Walk cycle timing, idle stance position, the draw animation frame gap, muzzle flash timing, and each death sequence — checked frame by frame until the extracted data produced behaviour identical to the original.

03 The rebuild

GUNFIGHTER 2025

The goal was never to improve it. The goal was the same game, on any modern machine — original assets, original feel, no emulator required, no configuration, just download and play.

Original everything

Every sprite came directly from the 1994 ADF — the actual clay photography, the original Amiga palette, the same frame geometry recovered from the AMOS offset tables. The clay texture, the hand-made proportions, the particular absurdity of the death animations — all of it exactly as it was.

Nothing was redrawn. Nothing was upscaled. It looks like 1994 because it is 1994.

Two things corrected

Two details were subtly wrong in the original coverdisk — almost certainly shipping bugs that were never fixed because nobody patches a free gift. The death animation had incorrect frame ordering on one character, and the muzzle flash appeared at a slightly wrong position relative to the gun barrel.

Both were fixed using the AMOS offset data as reference. The rebuild is, in these two small ways, more accurate to the original intent than the coverdisk itself was.

Built with Pygame

Python and Pygame — cross-platform, direct surface access, precise control over sprite blitting and frame timing. The game runs at the original framerate feel with no interpolation, no filtering, nothing that would soften the chunky clay aesthetic or change how it plays.

Still two players, one keyboard

Gunfighter was always a game you played with someone in the same room. That hasn't changed. Two players, one keyboard, same machine. Half the game is still watching your opponent's hands.

Python · Pygame Original 1994 sprites AMOS offset data applied Windows · macOS · Linux Two-player local Death sequences intact Corrected muzzle flash Corrected death frames

Download

The Windows build runs standalone — no Python required. Available via the Hylas Hub.

Hub login required — access here