A gleaming copy of the old Origin game Crusader: No Remorse showed up today:
Immediately, I delved in expecting to find Xan-encoded AVI files that would play perfectly using FFmpeg/Libav. Instead, I found a directory labeled flics/ that indeed has a lot of AVI files, but not in Xan. The programs attempt to interpret them as raw RGB. The strangest thing is the first frame often looks correct, if upside down:
The first file I peered inside had the video FourCC ‘RRV1’. Searching for this led me to this discussion forum where people have already been hacking on this very format (Origin games invariably get a heap of lasting love). The forum participants have observed that 3 codecs are in play in this flics/ directory, including ‘RRV1’, ‘RRV2’, and ‘JYV1’, which apparently correspond to the initials of certain developers. The reason that the programs identify the files as raw RGB is because the FourCCs don’t appear everywhere that they’re supposed to. Additionally, there are several trailers for other Origin/EA games stored in Cinepak format elsewhere on the disc.
It seems that I’m the person who added this title to the Xan wiki page, obviously with no first-hand evidence to back it up. Meanwhile, the forum participants speculate that the files are descended from the old Autodesk FLIC format (which would explain why they live in a directory called flics/). Corroborating strings extracted from the CRUSADER.EXE file include “FlicWait”, “FlicPlayer”, “Flic %s not found.”, “flicpath”, and “FLICPLAY.C”.
The disc also features a sound/ directory which contains AMF files. Suxen Drol already documented these on the wiki as Asylum Media Format files. The disc contains an ASYLUM.DLL file as well as a utility called MOD2AMF.EXE. The latter works beautifully on a random MOD file I had laying around. The AMF file is a bit larger.
See Also:
I do remember playing those amf files using modplug, some 10+ years ago.
.AMF files can also be DSMI module files, just to warn you. Both file formats are module formats, developed independently. DSMI was a Digital Sound and Music Library developed by Otto Chrons and first used in the DMF module player. DSMI was available for sale in the early to mid 1990s. DSMI .AMF files were usually smaller than their source .mod/.s3m files because it’s an event-driven format, like MIDI. (Unfortunately, it also means they don’t always play correctly, as some .mods use “jump-to-right-here” tricks in its patterns that didn’t translate in AMF.)
I have source code for interpreting DSMI .AMF files, but it might be best to just ask Otto Chrons for the latest DSMI source, if he still has it.
(Small correction: The name of the player was DMP, not DMF)
i’m a sucker for rare avi fourccs :)
and i’m trying to create a _complete_ database of them:
http://wiki.multimedia.cx/index.php?title=Category_talk:Video_FourCCs