So Ukraine is still holding against self-proclaimed second army of the world (though by this time it has earned the title of the most atrocious and hateful military force in the world, the title that had to be taken from the SS troops). And while I can’t stop worrying about my relatives, home city and home country in general, I still need something to distract me at least for a while.
While watching some video about video games, I spotted something surprising in it: a cutscene in Callahan’s Crosstime Saloon. While I worked on supporting Q video format in Legend Entertainment games I remember seeing just one video from that game (the animated title). So I tracked a full CD version of the game and discovered some surprising things about it.
First of all, it turned out to be version 7 of the format (and I’ve seen only versions 3-5 before). Second, it turned out to be mostly the same as version 5 but with F8 opcode in use. This opcode turned out to be used for compact representation of the colours where a code either introduces a cache of up to 15 colours or reuses some previous table and then tile colours are stored in a nibble. Third, beside cutscenes there are a couple of videos of some lady with a small child that look like a home video sneaked in by some developer.
There’s still a lot of work to be done to support it properly (because of the various quirks of the format) but I’ve managed to decode all of the videos from the game already, some of them even without artefacts. This is a pointless but fun distraction after all.