For testing how well NihAV handles palettised formats I’ve decided to add support for Gremlin Digital Video format (8-bit only). So now I can decode various cutscenes from Normality, one of very few 3D first person adventure games for DOS. I’ve tested my implementation and it works fine.
The funny thing is that this demuxer and decoder for GDV (actually there’s also GDV DPCM but the samples I have seem to use raw PCM) are missing from CEmpeg. Wiki description also has some parts missing.
The first frame I was decoding started with a code for copying 8 bytes from offset -56. The first frame. At the very first pixel. So I’ve consulted the VAG’s code and the original binary specification (even by dumping executed instructions in DosBox and analysing them—it helped me in debugging later) to see where it went wrong. And it turns out the decoder is really supposed to do that because it has specially initialised buffer before the actual frame data (kinda like the original LZHUF did, also there’s no need to check if we copy before the buffer start since it’s not possible) plus some other small issues. I’ll try to correct the Wiki article on GDV in the following days.
And I don’t really plan to add any other old game codecs beside VMD and Smacker (I have soft spot for them after all). Next decoders should be either for audio or more modern ones, like H.26x or Indeo 4/5 since I still have some ideas to test out.
Update to to this update: my decoder code is here.
CEmpeg MUST have it, GIVE the code!!!!