A quick look at Eidos Escape codecs

April 28th, 2024

As people remember, Eidos started as a company offering video editing software for Acorn RISC machines (do not confuse with Acorn RISC Machines company), but later it merged with a game publisher (more than once) and now it’s a Japanese game company. Yet the codecs they developed survived for some time in the games.

Since I was looking at ARMovie and found decompressors for Escape 100 and 102 codecs (essentially the earliest in the series) I looked at those as well and here’s a brief overview.

Both codecs are almost identical in design (only the luma code seems to differ), they operate on 160×128 frames in 5-bit YUV420 format, operating on 2×2 blocks. Chroma values are picked from the table of 256 combined U/V values. The codecs code data as a variable-length code for the number of blocks to skip (the same code seems to have survived until Escape 124) and the following block update mode (luma and/or chroma). As I said before, chroma values are taken from the table or left intact from the previous frame; luma values are coded two 5-bit values and 3-bit mask telling which value to use for the block elements (first element in the block is always the first value of course).

And that’s it. No other modes, the only frame header is 32-bit word with codec ID (later revisions decided to add frame size and even flags that affect decoding process). Nevertheless it’s rather interesting to encounter codecs that use simple two-colour vector quantisation (and fixed codebook for chroma pairs) without any additional image transformation tricks (e.g. motion compensation beside skipping, or even allowing raw blocks).

ARMovie: towards NihAV support

April 27th, 2024

Since I had nothing better to do I’ve documented various ARMovie codecs in The Wiki. Essentially what’s left is to document newer Moving Blocks variants (and implement a decoder for one with samples), early Eidos Escape codecs (no idea where to find samples for them though). Also there’s Iota Software codec 500 which has no samples but looks like it’s used primarily in ACE Film format so figuring out nuances of LZW compression there may help with yet another obscure format.

From the technical side the most annoying thing is that data is stored in multiple frames in a single chunk without any kind of size, separator or frame end marker being present. The original player simply expected decoders to report number of bytes consumed after decoding a frame. Which means packetisers that should parse the stream in the same way as decoders do and report the frame size—nothing too complex but still annoying (and I had to augment NAPacketiser API to take reported stream details into account, otherwise it has no way to know frame dimensions). The worst one was Moving Blocks parser. The main problem is that unlike most of the formats this one has frames not aligned to 16 bits—while video chunks are—so it has to deal with possible padding byte at the end of chunk.

Another annoying thing I haven’t really dealt with is detecting all those various sound formats from the format string.

I don’t know if I bother adding various raw video formats support but in either case I don’t regret looking at ARMovie. Even simple codecs turned out to be not so simple and sometimes with interesting peculiarities like run of colour pairs and even four-colour pattern painting in what should’ve been a simple RLE codec.

Acorn Moving Blocks variants

April 24th, 2024

Implementing decoders in NihAV goes slowly since ARMovie essentially stores track data all clumped together and requires a packetiser to split it into video frames. Of course it can always get worse: Actimagine VX stored audio data right after video frame data without storing video part size so you can decode audio only after you’ve decoded video part of the frame. Anyway, I’ve managed to hack a demuxer and even a working Moving Lines decoder. Before tidying it all up and implementing other decoders, I want to give an overview of other Acorn video codecs.

Surprisingly enough, Moving Blocks has some documentation (from the authoritative source nonetheless!). Of course it contains some minor mistakes, mostly some values in motion vectors table (some values have their minus sign forgotten and the order or some values for spacial copy vectors is wrong).

For those who’re simultaneously too lazy to read the description and curious enough to know how the codec functions, it’s simple: frames are split into 4×4 blocks, each block has a variable-length code for its coding mode—raw data (subsampled YUV apparently), motion compensated block (with a variable-length motion vector pointing to a previous frame or an already decoded part of the current frame) or split into 2×2 blocks with either raw or motion-compensated mode.

But that’s not all, the codec got development as Moving Blocks HQ. I have not fully analysed it yet but the main changes that now motion vector table is four times larger and includes extended range motion vectors, there’s no longer raw mode for 4×4 blocks (it got replaced with a dedicated skip mode) and raw 2×2 blocks use static Huffman coding (or at least it looks like that; also maybe it uses delta coding but I’m really unsure about that).

And of course they did not stop on that and created Super Moving Blocks. From what I can see it has a larger Huffman codebook plus slightly different modes (like skip modes for 2×2 blocks). I was unable to locate samples for it so it’s a theoretical exercise.

Apparently there was also yet another attempt called Moving Blocks Beta but since I could not find a decoder for it, we can only speculate what changes it had.

At least there will be something to document on The Wiki when I’m done with all this.

Update: now as I have a working decoder, I can say that I was wrong about some things in Moving Blocks. The specification is correct except for some motion values. As for the later revisions of the codec, I’ll postpone them as REing them will involve manual decompilation. Luckily for me there are more codecs to look at.

ARMovie: Moving Lines codec

April 22nd, 2024

While I’m trying to write a decent demuxer for the format, here’s the description of the first codec for it (I’ll postpone the rest until I implement a demuxer and a decoder for this one).

So, Moving Lines (aka codec 1) works on the usual 15-bit pixels and packs data into 16-bit words (sadly Ghidra fails to realise that LDR loads 16-bit data on ARMv4 but I’ll manage). Bits are read LSB first.

Here are patterns for the opcodes: first (low) bit signals a special code and when unset the rest of the word is a raw pixel. For special codes it’s easier to look at the top bits first though.

  • 0x0001..0x8FFF—copy the amount of pixels stored in the next 6 bits using displacement table (from -8,-8 to 8,8 excluding 0,0) with table index stored in the following 9 bits;
  • 0x9001..0xE5FF—copy data from the already decoded part of current frame, next 6 bits are amount of pixels to copy, the following 8 bits code the displacement (from -9,-9 to 9,0);
  • 0xE601—end of frame marker
  • 0xE603..0xEFFF—run series, 10 bits code run length minus one and the next codeword is pixel value;
  • 0xF001..0xF7FF—skip series, 10 bits code skip length minus one;
  • 0xF801..0xFFFF—raw data values, 10 bits code code number of values, the following codewords contain packed 15-bit values. In the end bitstream is aligned to 16-bit boundary.

Since video data is usually clumped together in large chunks you need to keep decoding it until you encounter end-of frame marker (and then data for the following frame starts).

That’s all for now, hopefully more will come soon.

Update: apparently XAnim (the greatest open-source multimedia player; sadly its subdomain seems to have expired) supported it as well (but no other video formats, not even raw ones).

Starting to look at ARMovie

April 20th, 2024

So while looking at various exotic formats, I decided to look at the other video format family from the A-class of computers. This time not Amiga but Acorn (so far nobody has updated Amiga binary loaders for Ghidra 11, I feel more and more that upgrading for 10.x series was a mistake). So, Acorn Replay Movie format for a computer using Acorn RISC Machine CPU.

For those who do not know, the format has human-readable header and may contain several audio and video streams in various formats. And it had a variety of video codecs supported from different vendors—raw YUV or RGB formats, repacked formats (like MPEG, Quicktime or M$ Video-1 and RLE) and some original ones. Apparently people cared only about some later codecs developed by Eidos Technologies as they were used in their PC games as well but there is more to it.

My search resulted in the following list of codecs (raw video codecs are omitted; also while many entries come from the official documentation, not all of them do):

  • 1—Acorn Moving Lines;
  • 7—Acorn Moving Blocks;
  • 12-13—MPEG wrapper (inside RPL or as a reference to an external file);
  • 14—IBM Ultimotion;
  • 17—Acorn Moving Blocks HQ;
  • 18—H.263;
  • 19—Acorn Super Moving Blocks;
  • 20—Acorn Moving Blocks Beta
  • 100, 102, 122, 124, 130—Eidos Escape codecs (but hardly anybody cares about the first two of those);
  • 500—LZW-compressed frames from Iota Software;
  • 600—M$ Video-1 8-bit;
  • 601—M$ Video-1 15-bit;
  • 602—Cinepak;
  • 603—QuickTime RPZA;
  • 604—QuickTime SMC;
  • 605—IBM Ultimotion (again);
  • 607—M$ RLE 8-bit;
  • 609—QuickTime 8-bit RLE;
  • 610—FLIC;
  • 613-615—QuickTime RLE, 4-, 16- and 24-bit variants respectively;
  • 622—WSS DL (in reality just palette plus raw pixels);
  • 623—ANM film wrapper;
  • 630—QuickTime VR wrapper;
  • 800—LinePack by Henrik Bjerregaard Pedersen
  • 802—Movie 16:3 by the same developer (apparently something similar to codecs like Video-1)
  • 803—a generic AVI/QT/FLI codec wrapper from the same developer.

The decoder format is well-documented so you just need to load raw binary to Ghidra without much hassle and you know what parameters to expect as well. I’ve actually looked at some of those codecs already and willing to continue.

So probably I’ll waste some indefinite time adding ARMovie support to NihAV with various codecs nobody cares about (and/or documenting them). I have not located samples for many of the formats but at least I’ve found some for codecs 1, 7, 17 and 800 which seem to be some of the most interesting ones.

Another quick look at two Amiga formats

April 17th, 2024

Considering the comment under my previous post, I had a better incentive to look at more formats. So here are two of them.

Since both are Amiga formats, here’s a summary picture:

First, Zoetrope Animation. The same ADF image containing BACKFLIP.rif has also the player sources (C + M68K assembly with comments). I have not studied them too closely but the main peculiarity of the format is that like its namesake it operates on image columns, employing simple RLE (and skip for inter frames). Also while it calls its format RIFF it has rather different structure (and may even pre-date more common RIFF by several years). And it seems to support different bitplane modes, as well as HAM.

Then, IFF VAXL. This is a conventional IFF with video properties inside VXHD chunk, PAD0 for padding, TMCD being always the same (is that a time between frames?), COLS containing something looking like some 12-bit palette entries, BMAP being of a constant size, SAMP probably containing PCM audio. But what about image data? Since it has a constant size fit for a 6-bit uncompressed image (and has 6 in the properties), I suspect it’s just Rohschinken uncompressed HAM (and trying to decode it as such results in a recognizable picture).

That was surprisingly easy but there are many more formats to look at.

A look at more formats

April 16th, 2024

As I mentioned in a recent post, I’ve tried using discmaster.textfiles.com to search for more exotic multimedia formats. Here’s a short report of the found formats of some interest.

I mostly looked at the formats listed as video but that could not be decoded. Or audio-only AVIs—some of them are really audio-only, others feature a video stream that was not recognized.

So, what I’ve found:

  • DK Animation—this turned out to be a simple RLE-based animation+sound format used in some interactive encyclopedias. It was rather easy to figure out format from the samples, while executables were rather useless (due to program design it’s next to impossible to locate the code responsible for animation handling without decompiling all of it;
  • PI-Video (used in a different set of interactive encyclopedias) turned out to be a simple quadtree-based codec (frame is divided into square tiles, each tile can be skipped, filled with one colour, subdivided further or, in case of 4×4 tile, filled with raw image). Additionally pixel values may be further compressed with LZW. That proved out to be the most interesting format out of the bunch;
  • there were a bunch of RIFF and IFF-based formats, often without a known decoder. Maybe I’ll look at them one day when I feel really desperate, but not today;
  • ESCP codec is a variation of Escape 130. After I changed FOURCC to the recognized E130 the file was somewhat decoded: there were countless decoding errors, visual garbage yet it produced almost perfect complex parts of the frame as well. I suspect it may have e.g. an additional field or two or some small bitstream tweaks;
  • and a special mention to tmot FOURCC which of course turned out to be TrueMotion 1 video.

It’s random finds like this that make life a bit less dull.

A subjective look on game industry

April 12th, 2024

It is hard to say something about russia that I haven’t said before, especially without resorting to expletives. Similarly it’s hard to say something new about the countries that care more about the terrorist state well-being more than about own reputation and safety. So here’s a random rant on a completely different topic which I’ve been wanting to write for a long time.

Those who know me are also aware of the fact that I prefer playing adventure games (and sometimes strategies) from 1990s but not something from 2000s or newer. That does not mean though that I’m not aware of more recent developments (my other hobby is knowing random information I have no use for, after all). So here I’d like to present my rather obvious views on the gaming industry and why Sturgeon’s law is too optimistic for this domain.
Read the rest of this entry »

A quick look at Gold Disk Animation

April 10th, 2024

Since I’m still looking for a thing to reverse engineer, I decided to see if this file service at discmaster.textfiles.com could offer some exotic formats. And indeed it can.

So there’s this AWI or AWM file format (it’s called AWI in the decoder libraries but the files I could find have extension .awm).

So this is more of a presentation format which has nested structure with chunk names in capital letters containing other chunks while chunks (i.e. everything is contained inside GDAW chunk, actual assets like PALT or BKGD stored inside RSRC chunk and presentation scenario probably being stored in SEEN chunk) with lowercase names having various specific data attached to them (e.g. psnm is followed by Pascal-style string with asset name, tzim contains compressed image data and nndn marks end of object data).

I have not looked too deep into it (no idea how the scenario works or what are the various object parameters) but here’s some information about resource types:

  • RLE4—a 16-colour RLE-compressed BMP, I presume;
  • RLE8—ditto but with 256 colours;
  • PALT—some global palette (but images still have their own);
  • BKGD—DCL-compressed background BMP;
  • ACTR—DCL-compressed BMP used as sprite;
  • WIPE—transition effect definition;
  • SWND—DCL-compressed WAV.

The most curious thing for me is that it used Pkware Data Compression Library to compress data. And while WAV files are compressed in one piece, BMPs are compressed as separate chunks—14-byte BMP header, 40-byte DIB header, palette, and image data. I think this was a conscious decision from the format and tool designers (in order to improve compression ratio a bit).

I’ll probably try to dig some more details and document it but the most interesting part for me (i.e. figuring out its outstanding design features) is done already.

A look at compressed game video formats

March 22nd, 2024

In order to distract myself from the thoughts why most politicians have their heads so deep in their asses that French ones out of all people seem to be the bravest, and what can I do to help destroying russia beside regular donations, here’s a post about completely unrelated REing work.

Since I had nothing better to do, I looked at the format use in Azrael’s Tear game and re-visited Talisman game. And while one of them is a 3D game from a British developer and another one is a 2D game from a German one, the cutscene formats used there have more in common than one would suspect (and their design distinguishes them from the majority of the formats).

It is common for various game formats to represent frames as small blocks with motion compensation or raw data, but I can’t remember any other such format that would use data compression on container level instead of it being a part of e.g. video data compression (of course there’s Ogg Matroska that implements such feature, but beside it I can’t think of any format doing that). In both of these formats (with not so creative extensions ANI and MOV) static Huffman compression is employed to compress several chunks of different data type. In ANI (used in Talisman game) data is split into groups of frames that start with a chunk defining which one of the predefined Huffman trees should be used to pack them all and to what symbols the codes should be assigned. In MOV (used in the other game, naturally) audio and video frame blocks are grouped into larger chunks and those chunks may be optionally compressed using static Huffman tree transmitted in the beginning of chunk payload.

ANI format features another peculiarity: there are other codecs that use motion compensation plus rotation (like formats from Cryo Interactive IIRC) but I can’t think about any other format that performs motion compensation and replaces one of the pixels in a block with a new value. Of course it is not a revolutionary idea but I haven’t seen it implemented like that before.

And that’s why I like those old game formats: they may be not the most effective ones but they contain more originality than the modern formats. The main problem is finding such a format—there are too many games released (which are also sometimes too hard to find) and the majority of them uses FLIC or Smacker anyway (or Cinepak in AVI or MOV for newer ones). But sometimes I encounter a mention of a game in some review and get lucky. I hope such finds happen more often though…