Tile Tester 3



Tile Tester 3 is the first test level from Catacomb Abyss (1992), residing unmarked in slot 19. It has no official name, but the MAPSABS.H file in the source code refers to it as 'TILE_TESTER_3_MAP'. It appears to be a level designed by the developers for testing the texturing, featuring a tile of each. Tile Tester 3 is the only playable test level in the orginal DOS game executable. It can be accessed via the level warp cheat. There are three additional test levels present in the game data, which do not work in the original game.

Walkthrough


Among the tiles are several doorways, and going through them takes you to The Towne Cemetery.

Messages

 * None

Enemies Present

 * None

Items Present

 * None

Trivia



 * Even the level warp cheat does not acknowledge this level, listing only levels 0 to 18. Warping to it displays "You have arrived at ". This is because there are only 19 entries in the array of level names in the source code file C4_GAME.C. According to NY00123, these level names are stored in the original DOS executable as an array of 19 pointers, each pointing to an address where the level name is stored. When attempting to warp to map 19, the array overflows and the first two bytes after the array are misused as a pointer. Since the actual level names are stored right after the array, the pointer is composed of the first two bytes of the string "The Towne Cemetery". Due to this, the level name of map 19 is expected to be at address 0x6854. In reality, this address should contain a pointer to one of the 16x16 background tiles. Since those tiles are never loaded in the Catacomb Abyss, there are only zero's stored at that address. This leads to an empty level name.
 * At least for the moderator, this level does not appear to launch in Reflection Keen.