So I’m still looking at the list of unsupported video formats from dexvert in hope something curious comes by.
First, out of curiosity, I looked at the unsupported Delphine Software CIN files. Apparently they merely don’t have audio streams and contain garbage in an audio part of the header (plus they have 1-2 video frames). Ignoring the audio header makes them decode. Next.
Second, EA MAD file—apparently it comes from a game rip with audio and video files being dummied out so it’s easier to share. Nothing to look here in any sense. Next.
So, one of SSA formats (no, not that one SSA animation format for Amiga, another one). It turned out to be rather complicated RLE for bit-plane coding. I.e. frames are coded as several bit-planes with the codec commands essentially being something like “skip to this offset in the current bit-plane, then update following 16-bit values with these new values, then skip a bit more and update some more values then skip…”. There are different opcodes for run/copy of certain sizes (or ranges) plus some additional operations for repeating a pair of values (and I thought LinePack was rather unique at that).
I actually ended up hacking a some decoder. It does not seem to handle 8-bit palettes well and there are still some glitches here (just look at the letter ‘D’ in the following image) but in works in principle.
From technical point of view it was not that hard. Even if Ghidra failed to decompile decoder function properly (mostly because of the opcode jumptable) it was nothing hard, even if I don’t know M68k assembly, expressions like move.l (A0)+,(A1)+ are rather intuitive so I could figure out which piece of code, say, copied 18 bytes and which one replicated the same 16-bit value to those 18 bytes.
I’ll try to find something else to look next, there’s still half a dozen of potentially interesting formats in the list.