This is a resource format (as one could guess from its name) used by Beam Software for various resources in its games. The first time I had to deal with it was when some anonymous contributor contacted me with a REd decoder for videos in Lost Vikings 2. I adapted for FFmpeg (wow, it’s been fifteen years ago) and added sound support as well.
Recently I decided to revisit it (previously I tried to adapt decoder for 15-bit video but could not make it exactly right for some reason). So I looked at it, it turned out to be exactly the same algorithm but depending on whether palette is present in the frame (yes, 256-colour palette with RGB555 entries) pixel data is read either as byte palette indices or raw 16-bit values. I also looked at The Dame was Loaded game and its FCP format turned out to use exactly the same compression but with a different frame format (16-bit sizes, different audio/palette/video order and so on). And the game audio uses packed 12-bit PCM (two samples without low nibble are stored in three bytes) which is not something you often see.
And with that I’m done with game formats for a long time. Probably I should write a toy encoder or two now.
something like Bink2 for sure…
I’m waiting for you to finish it. Maybe I’ll get bored enough to look at it again but don’t count on it.
I found the description of CRI P256 (Nintendo DS codec).
https://web.archive.org/web/20070602010100/http://cri-ch.tv/iwai/363.shtml
it uses colorpalette, inter/intra prediction, and LUT-based B256 coder.
I’m happy if you add this to multimedia wiki because I lost my password…
I’ll be happy to do that, thanks for the information!
I checked it, thanks to you!