Kostya's Boring Codec World

Since I have nothing better to do as usual, I decided to look at some game formats.

For instance, there’s a game called The Fuel Run promoting a product from a Swiss company supporting russian war crimes. This game has animations in VDO format. VDO file header starts with the string “Artform” and it employs RLE compression, each line of the frame prefixed with its size. What’s funny is that its RLE uses only bottom 6 bits for the run length and top bit is completely unused. For obvious reasons the format is not worthy documenting further.

Or there’s a game called Double Switch, this one has AVC videos. It uses RGB555 palette and 8×8 tiles that depending on opcode may be either coded with one of 25 predefined patterns and 1-7 colours or split into tiles of the smaller size. And only afterwards I decided to look into The Wiki and it seems to match SGA format description (except that this particular format variant is not documented). I don’t know if I should bother writing a decoder for it but with the lack of PC codecs to RE I might try my hoof at console ones instead.

This entry was posted on Friday, June 23rd, 2023 at 12:24 pm and is filed under Game Video. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.