Kostya's Boring Codec World

Here’s something worth reminding of, something I’m not going to tackle myself and it’s not likely somebody else will pick up. I’m talking about an intermediate form between static videos and interactive games, which I called (semi) interactive movies.

The best-known representative of those is Flash. Some of you old enough may remember it as a source of annoyance in form of extremely animated ad banners, some of you not so old may remember Flash games, younger people may remember it as an annoying web player that every video hosting required until they all got rid of it (reportedly by a whim of one man). But there was a time when Flash was used for its original purpose: creating animations (often bundled with a stand-alone player) or slightly interactive animations (like a blender with several buttons you can press and depending on it a different animation will play; it was gory and disgusting, it’s better to watch something nice and cute like Happy Tree Friends instead).

Of course Flash is reasonably well supported by open-source software to the point you can even run it in the browser without installing a plug-in. But there were more and not all from the same company.

Macintosh had MacroMind Director which allowed to create interactive applications a la HyperCard. Later it was ported to Windows as well and was used to create more or less portable games or activity centres and such. Eventually it was bought up with its sibling projects and compressed into shitbrickmud-brick, but meanwhile it managed to spawn several variations. There were “Gaffed Director movies” (usually bundled with stand-alone player), there were RIFF Multimedia Movies (in .mmm files), I’m pretty sure there more flavours of it too. Rather recently ScummVM started to support some games made with Director (which is not that easy task considering different engine revisions and that it often relied on platform-specific plug-ins for extended functions like playing videos or CD audio—up to decrypting data). So if you want to have support for the formats I mentioned the best course would be probably to write a new player based on their code-base (because it’s probably the best foundation to start from and ScummVM is for playing games, not this kind of content).

Another similar system I’m aware of is Brilliant Digital Entertainment’s Multipath Movies. I haven’t played any of them but from the description it sounds a lot like those DVD menu-based games. The engine seems to be under one megabyte and its data is self-contained (one large .bhf for the content plus auxiliary .map and .nav files—a striking difference from Director with its .cxt and .dxr files referencing each other and all other external resources).

There are so many old neglected formats that deserve to be preserved for the posterity, here I hope to remind people at least of some.

P.S. Why wouldn’t I implement it? Exactly because it’s not the kind of multimedia I work with. Mostly I write a decoder and I can do whatever I want with the decoded output. Here one has more to mind inner engine workings: interpreting engine script, synchronising output composed mostly of sprites, mind potential user input and such. And hardly any work on figuring how how video is compressed. So if you want to be the next open-source software hero—well, here’s a good challenge for you.

Occasionally I watch videos about old games and gaming history (because there might be an old adventure game I have not played or an old game with a custom video format I haven’t looked at). And sometimes I see the claims about somebody doing stuff first which are not true—usually because the competition is gone or only a small group of fanboys cares, so there’s nobody to disprove their claims. One such example would be the cult status of ZX Spectrum in late USSR and post-Soviet countries: it was essentially the only microcomputer that enthusiasts could afford (except for i8080/i8086 clones that were even worse), as the result it was praised for its uniqueness, revolutionary innovations and such; when USSR dissolved, IBM PC has won the market already and the systems from e.g. Commodore were virtually unknown. IMO ZX Spectrum had two advantages: partial compatibility with i8080 thanks to Zilog Z80 CPU and cheap and simple chipset that even USSR could clone and produce. The rest was subpar or shitty (especially its graphics that rivalled CGA in being eye-gouging bad)—but hardly anybody had experience even with Bulgarian Apple II clones let alone something better. So this rant is dedicated to similar situations with both computer hardware and software.

Let’s start with hardware.

For starters, a lot of people believe that CPU was invented by Intel while in reality it’s not just TI that beat them to it, there are many other predecessors as well. See this article for more details and arguments. But considering how many CPU companies have been around and surviving since 1970s it’s no wonder people forget about the no longer existing competitors. Similarly if you know what DEC Alpha did back in the day, Pentium achievements do not look that impressive.

Similarly Nvidia claims to have invented GPU—with a definition tailored to point at their product. Who cares about SGI, 3dfx, or even Argonaut Games with their Super FX chip? Apparently people still remember it but for how long…

And speaking about game consoles, here’s a nice video pointing out some things widely believed to have been invented by N*nt*nd* while they were not.

Let’s move to software and games specifically. There’s often-repeated claim about Lucasfilm Games being a pioneer in adventure games genre by introducing a scripting engine to drive it. To me that is a perfect example of a claim people believe because others were too modest to advertise the fact. While ADVENT(URE) was written in FORTRAN, its re-imagining Zork was later re-written in ZIL—a custom language for its own virtual machine designed specially for text adventures. What’s more, Ken Williams designed a custom engine for his wife’s game (which was the first graphical adventure game BTW) and later (Sierra) On-line adventure games (and sometimes other kinds of games too) have been running on some customisable scripting engine (ADL was replaced with AGI, AGI was replaced with SCI, SCI had been in use until the company was effectively killed). Similarly this post about The Secret of Monkey Island has this passage: “Back then, the randomly generated forest was cutting edge technology. Disk space was at a premium.” One can even get an impression it was something special invented by them—until you read this post from Al Lowe which describes how he’s done it in a games released a year prior to SoMI. And I guess the same approach has been re-invented by the console game creators even earlier.

And of course I can’t go past multimedia. I wrote a post about Opus, how similar CELT design is to G.722.1 especially to its version in RealAudio (mind you, it’s still innovative but not as much as you’d expect it to be); I have not explored it further but overall Opus design resembles USAC a lot and I don’t remember hearing anything explaining that “coincidence”.

Another thing is that the only open-source multimedia player that really came close to “plays it all” was the one released last century and it was called XAnim. I mentioned it before and it deserves to be mentioned again (and again). It had everything you don’t still have e.g. in VLC: frame stepping forward and backward, support for most of the formats of the day (and I suppose a good deal of them were reverse engineered by Mark Podlipec himself; I still sometimes find to my surprise that some obscure format like DL were supported by it). And for certain formats he could not support in open-source form he actually managed to negotiate and release closed-source plugins. For a very long time it served as the source of decoders for such projects as MPlayer or FFmpeg. Even more, its Indeo decoder plugins often were the only way to decode Indeo 4 and 5 on non-x86 Unix systems. After looking at it all achievements from other open-source multimedia players do not look that impressive. And yet its site is gone and it has not got a Wickedpedia page…

Moving on, there’s an “advanced” russian operating system developed by one guy which sounded revolutionary (flat address space encompassing both RAM and disk storage, persistence, inherent security achieved by allowing only interactions between objects). You may believe it unless you actually know a bit of computing history and start asking questions like “why does this persistence and object interaction sound almost exactly like Smalltalk environment?” or “why does this idea of really flat memory space sounds almost exactly like that OS from old IBM mainframes?”. The question “why did he decide to remove all mentions of KeyKOS from the documentation?” does not require an answer IMO.

And for the end let’s talk about a certain display system. Back in the day some people were dissatisfied with X11 and decided to make a modern replacement. That windowing system was supposed to use hardware acceleration where possible, object graph to manage input from different clients (and isolate them from each other), industry-standard ways of passing messages and such. That sounds a lot like Wayland? But that’s not it, I was talking about Berlin (it appears to be memory-holed; the rather generic name does not help searches either. The sad thing is that one of the developers haven’t learned anything from it and later created a programming language with too generic name—see the other repositories of that guy I linked if you still have no idea what I’m talking about).

Why I wrote this post? Definitely not to create a “top N innovative things that were invented elsewhere much earlier”. And it’s not to shame people (let alone companies—those have no shame by definition) either. I was just trying to remind the world that you should take even wide-known claims with a grain of salt since history is written by winners and the voices of those who lost the competition are often get forgotten or remain unheard. So maybe next time you hear about how great, innovative and even revolutionary something is, think about the proof of such claim beside the claimant words themselves.

I never had a reason to care about Halloween, and nowadays real world news are more scary than any imagined horrors. Yet I remembered one of my old trips so why not mention that curious fact.

There’s a town somewhere between Frankfurt and Frankfurt-lowcost airports named Oppenheim. People coming from there are obviously known as Oppenheimer, as well as their descendants and people marrying their descendants like the famous Lillian Oppenheimer (I know her as the person who popularised origami but apparently she’s a mother of several well-known mathematicians as well) and some guy claiming to become death, destroyer of the worlds.

But the town itself is more sinister, even if you disregard its catacombs. There’s Frankensteiner Hof—or residence of Frankenstein (maybe the descendant moved to Bavaria and got famous there). As for real monsters, just around the corner from the previous landmark they have a street named simply Zuckerberg—no suffixes for street or alley at all, just Zuckerberg.

It’s much better on the other side of Hessen—in Bavarian Miltenberg they have plainly named Hauptstraße (meaning simply “main street”) and parallel to it runs Mainstraße, specially for the foreigners who don’t understand German.