Sometimes I watch reviews of various old video games (usually of adventure type but not necessarily). This time it was Conquest Earth RTS from 1997 and the reviewer said magic words: “I was not able to extract or play videos with anything”. Okay, you got my attention.
I could find some .rpl files there using Escape 124 codec (yes, Eidos was the publisher, how could you tell?), some standalone .flh files and some flicN.wad archives. Despite the name, the archives turned out to have a footer, i.e. all metadata is stored at the end for a change. The video files seem to be some .flc but mostly .flh.
As one could reasonably expect, it turned out to be yet another hack of the old venerable FLIC format, now with RNCv2 compression. I did not look further to find out whether it’s raw frame or RLE-compressed data there but it does not matter much as the main features are already discovered.
There are many various FLIC extensions, like high(er)-bitdepth video, custom RLE coding schemes and even audio support. And that’s not counting the fun things like FLIC-in-AVI or FLIC-in-AVI. But I leave documenting all those format variations to The Multimedia Mike, gaming and documenting FLIC are his passions.
I can’t believe this page is still online:
https://www.compuphase.com/flic.htm
It has so many variations of the FLIC format that I had never encountered. I wonder if this variation is listed on that page?
It seems to be oriented on more enterprise variations (it mentions a completely different FLH) and we’re talking about game variations, there’s not even Bullfrog variant being mentioned there.