I’ve been working tirelessly on the MultimediaWiki for the past few days, importing all of my past technical documents. Plus, I have been unearthing all kinds of documents and notes. Fortunately, my new philosophy is to just get the information out there and organized via the Wiki rather than waiting until the information is perfectly, 100% complete and verified. Some new items:

• Description of American Laser Games’ multimedia format (IBM PhotoMotion?) by Peter Ross
• Description of the LOCO codec by Kostya that I have had for almost a year
• Somewhat incomplete description of the Duck TrueMotion 1 codec that I have been sitting on for much longer
• Scattered notes on LucasArts’ ScummVM that I wrote much too long ago

But what about MPEG? Right now, the Wiki is lacking for information regarding various MPEG audio, video, and transport formats. This was also a shortcoming under the original tech site organization. My big problem is that I simply don’t know a lot of the technical details behind MPEG. That seems to surprise a lot of people familiar with my activities. Fact is, I like to solve problems that need to be solved. Since so many other people seem to have MPEG locked down, I don’t worry about it.

So, to all who are more familiar than I in MPEG matters: What would be a good way to organize MPEG information in the MultimediaWiki?

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.