I'm still here

It was so long ago, but if you have any specific questions I can try to help.

Have you been able to locate the animation and movement tables that go with the sprites?

I'd like to see this repository too. I'm sure I can help you out on some of the more obscure stuff.

You are correct, the entire game (Universe) was written from scratch. Probably the only code shared would be the RNC unpacker

Del, how's it going?

By halfword, I shoulda said 2 bytes
I'm just thinking in terms of a word being 4 bytes (32 bits).

I never used any specific RLE algorithms, but they are RLE. The first 2 halfwords should be an offset from the home position (usually bottom center), followed by the bounding width and height (which could be different for each frame of animation). They might even be bytes, can't remember. OTOH here'...

Greeting gents, nice work so far.
This brings back very old memories as it was my first game!
Someone mentioned that they thought it was written in Borland C, in fact it was written in 100% assembler, 80186 I believe.