In my recent post about na_game_tool 0.2.5 release I complained that I still miss formats starting with letters B, O, W, Y and Z. Well, after an extensive search I’ve managed to find two formats to cover some missing letters.
First is the animation format used in some DOS version of the game Baldies (it’s an RTS game released on consoles as well as on Windows and DOS—and there was even an early Amiga demo apparently). CD with DOS/Windows version employs ordinary FLIC, (floppy?) DOS version and demos used its own animation format instead. It’s rather ordinary RLE anyway in a BAL(d) file as the rest of game resources.
The second game, Los Justicieros (or Zorton Brothers, which is a much better title for my purposes) is much more interesting game. It has a format with various compression methods as well as audio chunks and palette manipulation commands (like fade to black or fade to a new palette). And the compression methods are a mix of RLE and tile-based VQ (in both senses). One method decodes picture as RLE, another one uses RLE on updates to the previous frame, third method either codes whole frame in 4×2 two-colour tiles or codes an update mask first and draws only updated tiles. The fourth method uses RLE on updates as one of the previously described methods, but instead of pixels it codes two-colour 4×4 tiles. Another fun thing is that there are (at least in the version I was able to locate) five files in this format: four of those code one still image and the fifth one codes over half an hour of all video scenes.
In either case it was a very curious format—exactly the reason why I like to examine those old games.
Meanwhile I’m trying to write decoder for .RFB format again (3rd or 4th attempt). Already did sort of demuxer, have yet to find out if parser is needed, because apparently there is not end marker of fill frame with various encodings types. Raw compression is trivial, and looks like split into multiple packets, have only hextile encoded (type 5) compression files, but its not hard to encode own .rfb files?
That 512×512 wavelet project is still alive, and I think extending support for 4k in that case is rather trivial, just use multiple tiles, which is very low effort.
I vaguely remember that RFB specification is rather simple (and there’s a decoder for some of it in VMNC codec already). And I guess you can produce lots of files by installing local RFB server, client and capturing the session.
The only problem is that it’s a network protocol for sporadically updating parts of frame when the server is polled, so timestamps are a mess.
As for that project, I stopped following it so please let me know when there’s a paper on neatness metric is produced or something else beside tweaking the weights is really done.