---
title: "The Crown"
id: 14301
type: "product"
slug: "the-crown"
url: "http://localhost/product/the-crown/"
markdown_url: "http://localhost/product/the-crown.md"
published_at: "2019-11-30T01:44:07+00:00"
modified_at: "2026-03-22T13:28:12+00:00"
author: "David Anderson"
featured_image:
  url: "http://localhost/wp-content/uploads/2019/11/TheCrownTitleImage.png"
excerpt: "The Crown has been stolen by an evil wizard! It is up to you, the great adventurer, to restore the Crown to the people of the world in order to protect them from evil forces. This is not an easy task, since the Crown has been hidden somewhere deep within the dungeon. An adventure game…"
category:
  - name: "Games"
    slug: "games"
    taxonomy: "category"
    url: "http://localhost/category/software/games/"
post_tag:
  - name: "Downloadable"
    slug: "downloadable"
    taxonomy: "post_tag"
    url: "http://localhost/tag/downloadable/"
  - name: "Games to Learn By"
    slug: "games-to-learn-by"
    taxonomy: "post_tag"
    url: "http://localhost/tag/games-to-learn-by/"
  - name: "TS 2068"
    slug: "ts2068"
    taxonomy: "post_tag"
    url: "http://localhost/tag/ts2068/"
model:
  - name: "Timex/Sinclair 2068"
    slug: "ts-2068"
    taxonomy: "model"
    url: "http://localhost/model/ts-2068/"
indiv:
  - name: "Brian Walker"
    slug: "brian-walker"
    taxonomy: "indiv"
    url: "http://localhost/indiv/brian-walker/"
genre:
  - name: "Game"
    slug: "game"
    taxonomy: "genre"
    url: "http://localhost/type/game/"
  - name: "Software"
    slug: "software"
    taxonomy: "genre"
    url: "http://localhost/type/software/"
creator_indiv:
  - name: "Brian Walker"
    slug: "brian-walker"
    taxonomy: "indiv"
    url: "http://localhost/indiv/brian-walker/"
company:
  id: 10892
  title: "Games to Learn By, Inc."
  type: "company"
  url: "http://localhost/company/games-to-learn-by/"
price: 9.95
date: 1983
rarity: "Rare"
related_products:
  - id: 52656
    title: "The Crown"
    type: "computer_media"
    url: "http://localhost/computer_media/the-crown/"
companies_products:
  - id: 10892
    title: "Games to Learn By, Inc."
    type: "company"
    url: "http://localhost/company/games-to-learn-by/"
---

# The Crown

The Crown has been stolen by an evil wizard! It is up to you, the great adventurer, to restore the Crown to the people of the world in order to protect them from evil forces. This is not an easy task, since the Crown has been hidden somewhere deep within the dungeon.

An adventure game that will keep you traveling through a Medieval Castle, caverns guarded by strange and fearsome creatures such as giant-sized beetles, wild dogs, goblins, skeletons, floating heads, ghouls and an occasional dragon.

## Game Play

The game itself is very Rogue-like, in fact somewhat improved over Rogue in some ways as it uses a custom graphical character set, and has custom drawn graphical rooms. As with the entire RPG genre, a good imagination helps.

The game can be used with keyboard or a combination of joystick and keyboard.

### Commands

The ‘h’ key brings up the help screen for commands. Commands include:

- **q z o p** for up, down, left, right
- **a** for attack
- **f** for fire arrows
- **g** for grab treasure
- **d** for drink potions
- **i** for inventory
- **s** to search for secret doors

This program was rescued by [Jon Becker](http://localhost/indiv/jon-becker/).

## Notes

At long last I have managed to recover a working version of 'The Crown' for the TS2068. This has been a goal for me for a long time.

With much concern I confirmed my original tape has an error (I remember it got corrupted long ago, probably due to a tape head that became magnetized), BUT I also located the backup tape I made in the early 80's which turned out to be intact (I had taken special care to not touch it). However the backup was not without issues- my early teen hacker self had made a modification to the screen load image of that backup copy, just for fun. I recovered the original screen image from the intact portion of the original tape, and have pieced it back together with the working backup program using Audacity / tzxtools / fuse-utils.

As I now recall, side B of the tape is used to load multiple levels on demand (the Levels tape). Which makes the size of this game significantly over 48k of code and data. I have also successfully recovered the Levels B side, and have verified that it can be used to move to the next level (there are 3 levels in total, and the original levels tape has multiple copies of the levels in 1-2-3 order so that you can just start and stop the tape again to load the appropriate level on demand).
Anyone fancy analyzing the format and creating a level editor?

The game itself is very Rogue-like, in fact somewhat improved over Rogue in some ways as it uses a custom graphical character set, and has custom drawn graphical rooms. As with the entire RPG genre, a good imagination helps.
The game can be used with keyboard or a combination of joystick and keyboard.
The 'h' key brings up the help screen for commands (basically q z o p for up, down, left, right, a for attack, f for fire arrows, g for grab treasure, d for drink potions, i for inventory, s to search for secret doors, etc..)

The Crown is quite playable and enjoyable with the Fuse emulator in my opinion (I do remember it was a bit slow but playable on original hardware).

I made a good faith attempt to find the original author, Brian Walker. I thought for sure I had found him when I found that a Brian Walker had created the Rogue-alike game 'Brogue' which runs on Windows, Mac OS, and Linux. I got in touch with him but he confirmed he was not the author of 'The Crown'. There are some other candidates I have not been able to confirm at this time.

Although I played with extracting the data into .tzx files, the .wav files still seem to be the easiest way to get it working well with the Fuse emulator.

I played a bit with with tzx tools and fuse-utils, and while I was able to extract working .tzx components, not everything works perfectly (it might be the way Fuse handles them). I am also finding that the default settings in fuse-utils seem to work differently from the Fuse emulator. I did play around with parameters in both audio2tape and tzxwav with varying degrees of success, as well as worked on a block by block .tzx reconstruction. I will include these files as well, but so far the best way to run it on Fuse seems to be simply the .wav files. Maybe someone else can improve on this.

I was also able to confirm the ability to change to the next level with Fuse using the Levels tape image.
The groups files section doesn't seem to be enabled, so due to the size of the archive I am posting a link to the archive here:
https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1401tgiyQuvi6kw92S1EnAT9SdKrCYik1?usp=sharing

Again here is the blurb from the 'Games to Learn By Inc.' catalog I bought it from circa 1984, which I still have a copy of:

1142 Games The Crown 9.95 (GTLB)

THE CROWN HAS BEEN STOLEN by an evil wizard!! It is up to you, the great adventurer, to restore the Crown to the people of the world in order to protect them from EVIL FORCES. This is not an easy task, since the Crown has been hidden somewhere deep within the dungeon.

An adventure game that will keep you travelling through a Medieval Castle, caverns guarded by strange and fearsome creatures such as giant-sized beetles, wild dogs, goblins, skeletons, floating heads, ghouls and an occasional dragon.

----
So- enjoy your adventure through the castle/dungeon, watch out for the Pig Man, and don't forget to emerge once in a while to talk to your family this holiday!

Jon

https://ts2068.groups.io/g/main/message/4932