Kostya's Boring Codec World

This is a resource format (as one could guess from its name) used by Beam Software for various resources in its games. The first time I had to deal with it was when some anonymous contributor contacted me with a REd decoder for videos in Lost Vikings 2. I adapted for FFmpeg (wow, it’s been fifteen years ago) and added sound support as well.

Recently I decided to revisit it (previously I tried to adapt decoder for 15-bit video but could not make it exactly right for some reason). So I looked at it, it turned out to be exactly the same algorithm but depending on whether palette is present in the frame (yes, 256-colour palette with RGB555 entries) pixel data is read either as byte palette indices or raw 16-bit values. I also looked at The Dame was Loaded game and its FCP format turned out to use exactly the same compression but with a different frame format (16-bit sizes, different audio/palette/video order and so on). And the game audio uses packed 12-bit PCM (two samples without low nibble are stored in three bytes) which is not something you often see.

And with that I’m done with game formats for a long time. Probably I should write a toy encoder or two now.

While the situation in Ukraine is stable bad so I keep looking at game formats instead of playing those games instead.

Apparently there’s a German adventure game from mid-1990s called Talisman and that’s about all I can tell about it. Yet it seems to have rather interesting animation format that’s worth talking about.

It turned out to be codebook-based compression with a codebook shared by a group of frames (typically 20-30) and actual codebook being created from a transmitted codebook data mixed with the static codebook (an interesting fact: unlike many other game formats, this one not merely allows seeking inside, there’s a special chunk preceding group of frames with the same codebook that contains an offset of the next such chunk). Tile operations are either copying 2×2 tile from another part of the frame (optionally updating one pixel in it) or reading it raw.

While it’s not the most complex format ever it turned out to be interesting enough. And with that I’ve probably exhausted the game video formats to look at. I’ll probably revisit SIFF but that’s about it.

While Iran wages a proxy war with Ukraine (and I can easily believe they’re not against doing it to the last russian), I’m still trying to distract myself by looking at various video formats in games I have no intention to play.

Finding games with unknown formats gets harder and harder (or at least more tedious). So here are two games with an interesting approach to video compression.

Dark Earth packs frames as separate planes with 5-bit components and each plane is compressed using a peculiar modification of LZ77 scheme: depending on a bit set, it either codes a run or a forward reference in either the same or previous buffer. Additionally it codes it using non-bytealigned stream (run mode is coded in 13 bits and copy mode takes 25 bits).

There’s also Defcon 5 game (the one from the mid-1990s, do not confuse it with a game with the same name but from a previous decade). This one employs a different method I don’t remember seeing anywhere else: painting squares. Of course you’re used to various codecs splitting tiles in blocks and filling them (from older codecs using quadtrees to H.26x and its rip-offs). This one does it differently though: there is a fixed set of tile sizes selected for each video (I’ve seen only 32, 16, 8, 4, 2 set though) and frame data is essentially a list of commands telling at which offsets to paint a tile of this size with a given colour (those offsets may be completely arbitrary). It may be not the most efficient compression algorithm but it’s quite interesting. Also the container specifies palette as fixed and changing colours—first part is stored in the header and the second part is transmitted with each frame. Again, it’s not something extremely effective but I can’t easily remember any other format doing it that way.

I’ll probably try to do something different next time but I consider time spent on looking at these formats well-wasted.

Since I have nothing better to do and I don’t feel a desire to write a lengthy rant about what’s wrong with this world (beside the fact that russia still exists of course), I keep looking at various games I can find in order to see if they have some interesting format. Last time I’ve managed to locate an elusive Indeo IVF sample, now it’s rather curious FMV format.

So there’s an unpublished PC game called Highlander: The Last of the MacLeods which is apparently some kind of 3D action game based on the animated series (one of those, the franchise seems to have a lot in it beside the one good movie). And it turns out that it has a three dozen of FMV clips in proprietary format (stored inside mov.dat but extracting them is trivial).

From technical point of view the format is rather simple but video compression is rather peculiar: each frame in coded independently by painting each 4×4 block with 1-16 pixels using a certain pattern. That’s common but this data is packed with a simple history-based method: depending on a flag a value is rather read raw or reused from a history buffer depending on two previously decoded values. And now there’s a twist—this compression is applied twice.

Overall, it was fun to look at the format even if I don’t care about the game itself and the video quality is rather poor (probably thanks to the rather low bitrate and fixed palette all those FMVs share despite half of them being digitised animation clips and half of them being recorded in-game 3D animation). Still, now I can play the files with NihAV if I ever get such desire.

It’ll take a long time to liberate Ukraine from the invaders, so while it goes on I have to entertain myself somehow.

Since I had nothing better to do I looked at two FMV games—Deadly Tide and Hot Wheels: Stunt Track Driver. Both of them have their levels packed as video data with some additional control data.

Deadly Tide is more complex one with its L96 format: it defines a resource file with several possible sub-levels and three different video streams (something like 320×240, 160×120 and 80×80) compressed with Cinepak plus half a dozen of various control resources and audio stream.

Hot Wheels uses JAM format which is a series of compressed chunks. 0 – frame data, 2 – palette update (strangely enough it updates palette not from the start but rather to the end), 3 – some control data. Frames are stored either unpacked, packed with LZSS or packed with differential LZSS (in this case copy operation takes bytes from the previous frame). Oh, and it uses obfuscated WAV files for audio that I didn’t bother to look at.

I’m still looking for an interesting format to RE, meanwhile those two were at least somewhat interesting.

Recently I’ve encountered a review of an old FMV game called Ripper and my professional interest was to look what formats it uses. Well, it turned out to use Smacker and AVI. And those AVI files are their own format that uses Smacker in perverse way: it stores a sequence of commands with 14-byte header that control video playback. The first dozen of commands are usually “fill audio buffer with this data” commands and there’s one command for initialising video that includes full Smacker header inside its payload. From what I see it abuses Smacker decoder by constructing file on the fly using the data from the commands (I’m pretty sure the following commands have video frames in their payload).

I’m not sure if I’d want to pursue it further and document it let alone adding support for it in NihAV but that format was definitely something.

Recently somebody asked me how to play MOV files from the game. My answer was that I don’t know and we need to wait until somebody reverse engineers of that engine. Meanwhile I took a second look to see if I missed something apparent (spoiler: no).
(more…)

Here’s a result of another attempt to distract myself from the thoughts whether Ukraine will kick out the invaders in a steady manner or if the führer will resort to chemical or nuclear weapons.

So I decided to take a look at random FMV game and Voyeur II came to my attention. From what I know the first instalment uses RL2 videos and is supported by ScummVM. The second game, however, uses a completely different format and packs most of the data into few volumes (80% of the data on CD is in single diskN.vol and the rest of the data is mostly in endings.vol and slides.vol).

Those volume files turned out to be archives as expected, and the content of those archives turned out to be kinda archives too.

The data stored in volume files is bits of video usually one or two seconds long but the way they’re stored is somewhat peculiar. The header defines (always?) four streams, two of which are dummy ones and the other two are audio and video correspondingly (and they can turn up in any order). The rest of the file is a collection of blocks with 8-byte header defining block size and to which stream it belongs to—and yes, blocks for different streams may be interleaved. Audio stream seems to be plain PCM and video stream is a sequence of frames (thankfully, 14-byte frame header contains packed frame size).

So, what about video compression? It’s RLE with a small twist: there are intra- and inter-frame RLE variants and they can use double-pixel mode (i.e. where you skip or fill the doubled amount of pixels and for raw pixel data each pixel is repeated twice on output). Inter-frame RLE compression has skip codes (i.e. at first you read how many pixels you need to skip, then you read either raw pixels to update the frame with or RLE data depending on opcode, and then you read next skip code and repeat it until the end of frame). Additionally it seems the video is always 320×160 and only video height is stored in the files.

All in all, the most interesting part there turned out to be the logical organisation of data and not the RLE compression or actual videos (I checked random couple of dozens of samples from over two thousands total videos and nothing piqued my interest). Maybe I’ll find something more interesting next time.