Author Archives: Multimedia Mike

On Portable Programs

Someone once asked on one of the xine mailing lists, “Is xine big endian or little endian?” Clearly, the person was confused but his heart was in the right place: He had heard about the endianness issue and that it affects machine portability somehow. Here is Multimedia Mike’s quick and easy guide to what you need to know about endianness and platform portability:


When the CPU interacts with the outside world, the CPU needs to worry about endianness.

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Rant From The Past: Linux on PowerPC

I dug up this old rant on my hard drive. The way it is formatted I obviously intended to publish it. The file is dated April 28, 2001. Some of you may find it interesting or amusing. More data on this episode is archived at the Yellowdog Linux mailing list. In the end, I solved the problem and got Linux onto a PowerPC machine but it took me 9 days from the start of my journey until the end.

Trying to Install Linux on a PowerPC

All I want to do is run Linux on a PowerPC machine…it’s a good thing I appreciate a challenge…

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Game Formats Division

Recently, I have been getting reports left and right from people who have successfully reverse engineered old game-oriented multimedia formats. Sometimes the reports overlap, i.e., 2 people have independently RE’d the same format. I thought I would update my list of upcoming game-related formats (here’s the last entry I wrote on the matter):

  • TGV, used in various Origin games, most notably in Privateer 2: The Darkening. I have 2 contacts who have independently RE’d this format.

    • Further, it is worth investigating how this format relates to the TGQ format found on Warcraft II: The Dark Saga for the Sega Saturn.

  • EA WVE/UV2 files, which are principly Motion JPEG files
  • Multimedia from American Laser Games titles, notably Mad Dog McCree. Again, I have 2 contacts who have independently RE’d this format. This might be the IBM PhotoMotion video codec as the manual for Mad Dog McCree credits that format.
  • BRP, used in a few Argonaut games such as Alien Odyssey. After VAG figured out Argonaut’s AVS format it was postulated that their later BRP format is also a vector quantizer. It certainly looks that way based on cursory investigations.

Codec Writers’ Humor

A fellow multimedia hacker, Benjamin L., pointed out that a reverse engineer might find some odd numbers in data tables while poking through binary codecs. For example, 0xbaadc0de and 0xdeadbeef. Sense of humor? Certainly. But why would such nonsense values be there? That is a question worth exploring. They sometimes turn up in codec data tables. Dead spots? Don’t-care values? Strange.