Today I’d like to sum up my experience looking at various game video formats, none really finished or worth documenting. In case you wonder I’ve not played (or plan to play) either of these games, I just found a place with some adventure games and looked at them for anything not known to me (and below is what’s left after discarding games using Cinepak, Smacker or Truemotion).
First of all, SIFF format used by Beam Software. It turns out that in their game The Dame Was Loaded has various resources in this container format but even larger ones look more like special game resources than videos (think about .RBT vs .VMD in SCI32 games). But there’s Alien Earth with a newer video compression and audio—both 16-bit now. Since I was unable to find the code that plays it, I’ve found the details by studying the files. The compression seems to remain largely the same except that pixels are 16-bit, pattern coding has changed (and the patterns are coded in the binary) and old “palette present” flag is reused to signal that fill values take one byte instead of two (for black values it’s enough).
Now let’s look at various Cyberflix games like Dust: A Tale of the Wired West or Titanic: Adventure out of Time. From what I could find the .mov files found there are similar in the structure with other kinds of resource files. And even if the game explicitly demands 256-colour video mode I could not see anything resembling a palette inside those files. My conclusion is that they’re not real video files either but rather some game scripts and graphics.
And let’s end it with The Vampire Diaries. This is another game with video files without palette. It seems to store just video frames either uncompressed or compressed with LZSS scheme. It’s not interesting enough to dig further.
I guess this is it and I should finally return to writing proper NihAV video player.
How do you open the Titanic’s .Mov files? NOne of the players do it and nobody is asking. One thread someone asked and it was just a joke LOL thread.
I opened them with a hex viewer to see the contents. From what I saw inside it was not resembling a real video file. I guess you need to wait until somebody (not me though) reverse engineers the engine.