I have never really figured out what role Reddit plays in the grand scheme of things. But someone over there has taken an interest in figuring out the Treasure Master code system, something on which I have previously hypothesized.

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It’s a determined bunch and I’m impressed with the headway they seem to be making. I never had time to get to the bottom of this. I’m eagerly watching to see if they can crack this ancient and useless puzzle.

I played an old DOS game a few months ago by the title of Klondike Moon. I really didn’t comprehend it at all. The gameplay dealt with outerspace mining while the storyline was something about paying off your debt with the proceeds of your labor while also actively thwarting your opponents from making good on theirs. That struck me as odd– it wasn’t about stealing what they had, it was merely a scorched earth matter to ensure that they couldn’t prosper.

But taking a second look at it recently, I noticed that the CD-ROM has a VIDEOS/ subdirectory. Clearly, this directory holds the FMV for the game. Each FMV is actually spread across 3 files: A .VID file (I’m presuming this is the video data), a .SFX file (looks to be raw, unsigned, 8-bit PCM), and a small .SEQ file (I suspect this ties all the data together). There are 23 .SEQ files which are either 26, 37, 103, 114, 158, 312, or 1280 bytes large. These numbers all happen to be divisible by 11 if 15 is first subtracted away which leads me to believe that each contains a 15-byte header followed by a series of 11-byte records.

Meanwhile, the .VID files clearly begin with 768-byte palette. I don’t think that the frames are uncompressed, paletted images, or else the frames are not a common width.

I’m trying to remember a formula — I seem to recall something from the discrete math branch of mathematics — for doing remainder math, something involving an operator that looks like an equal sign but with 3 bars instead of the customary 2. It turns out that the concept I am searching for is modular arithmetic. I was hoping that this could lead me to a formula that would show me possible frame dimensions given the size of the files, but I’m too tired to figure it out right now. You’re welcome to study the files and their sizes, though.

MultimediaWiki page and samples, as is customary.

Do you have any idea who killed Jennifer Shefield?
How well did you know Jennifer Shefield?
What can you tell me about Jennifer Shefield?

Call me cold, but I just can’t bring myself to care about the above questions more than I care about what multimedia format is being used in an old Amiga shareware game simply entitled Murder, the demo of which can be downloaded in 11 .lha files from Aminet. LHA… does that ever take me back to the BBS days. That and ARJ.

Back to the format, though, it’s definitely not related to Sega’s FILM format (one of my all-time favorite formats). I think this may just be a series of Amiga IFF files with a header on them. This is because I see markers such as “8SVX”.

The files also contain curious advice about playback. Apart from a string that specifically stipulates “Motorola 68000 family”, there’s also this tidbit in the header: “Amiga Hint LIST subtype FILM requires that all CAT chunks are exactly the same size, start at long word boundaries (pad with filler chunks) and come one after the other right to the end of the LIST. Write to agmsmith at 71330.3173@CompuServe.com for more info.” I would email that address for the sake of due diligence but — darn — bad timing! CompuServe finally died just last week. The files were apparently made by a piece of software named AGMSMakeFilm which also seems to be available at the Aminet.

MultimediaWiki page and samples, naturally.

I was contacted by someone who is performing an in-depth investigation of the data files for the game Are You Afraid of the Dark? The Tale of Orpheo’s Curse. During the course of said investigation, he happened across my old Multimedia Exploration Journal entry where I briefly inspected a CD-ROM copy that I had procured.

Oddly, my notes concluded that there was nothing interesting on the disc and that the contents would fit on a standard 5.25″ floppy disc. This might be a case where the game was unremarkable, multimedia-wise, for for its original floppy-based release but was upgraded for a subsequent CD-ROM release.

He was able to work out the identities of many of the data files. These include AIFF, MID, and even tracker module formats like 669 (no, Colin, I don’t have that loader finished; to the rest of you… nevermind). He also found what we suspect is a FMV format called UMV and provided 3 samples. I looked at it briefly but nothing jumped out at me, save perhaps for some signed 8-bit PCM audio chunks. This would be unusual since most 8-bit PCM of the time was unsigned.

I know you want to tinker with the samples, so here is the requisite MultimediaWiki page, along with the 3 UMV samples.

No multimedia format is too obscure. That reminds me– I have a multimedia-looking file hanging around on one of my filesystems called CREDITS.NXL. Does that sound familiar? Did anyone reading this send that to me? What game is it from? I suspect I received it from a kind, curious contributor but was too lazy at the time to post details on the wiki.