Kostya's Boring Codec World

Since I have nothing better to do, I decided to look at the formats used in various Tex Murphy games.

So here they are (the game from this millennium does not count):

• Mean Streets—it uses raw images in ILBM-inspired format (so that even some chunk names are still the same) grouped with e.g. palette files and packed in ZIP using ancient compression methods (shrink and reduce, I wonder if anything but ancient PKZIP.EXE can unpack them all);
• Martian Memorandum—the only VID file present looks like mostly raw image data interleaved with some metadata to tell which regions to update (though judging from ScummVM sources it may also employ RLE for sprites);
• Under a Killing Moon—this one has new format starting with 32-bit size followed by signature “PTF” and after 64-byte header I see the suspiciously familiar chunk structure: 32-bit size, 16-bit signature 0xF1FA that contain some sub-chunks of its own… I refer you to The Multimedia Mike, he should be able to recognize the format;
• The Pandora Directive—this one uses format that starts with “H2O” and seems to be Huffman-compressed RLE;
• Tex Murphy: Overseer—this one decided not to be creative and used Smacker files (along with some FLICs).

So, despite its nine-year history (again, only the games from last millennium) those games have changed the format used for video segments yet they have not moved further than RLE.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, August 30th, 2023 at 11:51 am 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.