Time Bandit is an action-adventure game written for the TRS-80 Model I by Bill Dunlevy and Harry Lafnear and published by MichTron in 1983. It was ported to the TRS-80 Color Computer, Dragon 32, MS-DOS, Amiga and Atari ST. but enjoyed its greatest popularity several years later as an early release for the Atari ST. Amiga and MS-DOS-versions were ported by Timothy Purves.
Development
According to Harry Lafnear, Time Bandit was based on the 1982 arcade game Tutankham and was originally called Pharaoh.
Open Source?
The game has been available at various sites for many years, but in 2018/9 it was clearly given permission by all involved to released under an Open License, the Creative Commons BY-NC-SA, after asking permission from Bill Dunlevy, Harry Leafner, former Microdeal publisher John Symes and current owners of what was left of Michtron. This is an ongoing effort to release the Microdeal/Michtron-titles for legal preservation.
We are looking to see if we can restore some of the source code from the original game, all we can offer at the moment is the image files for usage in an emulator.
Help!!
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Are you a former Microdeal/Michtron contact or worker and happen have an old backup of the source code for any of the platforms? Please help us and send it to us. It is totally fine to send it anonymously. We will solve any permission issues, preservation is important.
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Do you want to resource the game to restore the source code. Go ahead, we encourage you, don’t forget to notify us.
Trivia
Many thanks to
John Symes, and the Dorsmans for being positive about the project and giving permissions Bill Dunlevy and Harrleafner for creating this wonderful game, and being permissive and supporting of preserving their work under liberal usage license.