{"id":3755,"date":"2012-03-29T23:47:00","date_gmt":"2012-03-30T06:47:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/multimedia.cx\/eggs\/?p=3755"},"modified":"2012-03-29T23:47:00","modified_gmt":"2012-03-30T06:47:00","slug":"g-i-joe-custom-multimedia","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/multimedia.cx\/eggs\/g-i-joe-custom-multimedia\/","title":{"rendered":"G.I. Joe Custom Multimedia"},"content":{"rendered":"

I received this 3-disc set of G.I. Joe CD-ROMs today:<\/p>\n


\n\"\"<\/a>
\n<\/center><\/p>\n

Copyright 2003, and labeled as PC ONLY. Each disc claims to have 2 episodes. So are these some sort of video discs? Any gaming elements? I dove in to investigate.<\/p>\n

So, it turns out that there are some games on these discs, done in Flash Player (which tells me that these were probably available on the web at some point). Here’s a shooting gallery game from the first disc:<\/p>\n


\n\"\"<\/a>
\n<\/center><\/p>\n

As promised by the CD-ROM copy, the menu does grant access to 2 classic G.I. Joe episodes. Selecting either one launches this:<\/p>\n


\n\"\"<\/a>
\n<\/center><\/p>\n

Powered by C-ezy? Am I interpreting that correctly? Anyway, the video player goes fullscreen and looks fine (given the source material). I can’t capture screenshots and controls are limited to: space for pause, ESC to exit player, and up\/down to control volume. No seeking and certainly no onscreen controls. Pretty awful player.<\/p>\n

Studying the first disc, I find a 550 MB file with the name 5859Hasbro.egm. Coupled with ep58.cfg and ep59.cfg files in the same directory, I gather that the disc has G.I. Joe episodes 58 and 59 (though the exact episodes, “There’s No Place Like Springfield” parts 1 and 2, are listed on Wikipedia<\/a> as being episodes 154 and 155; but who’s counting?). The cfg files contain this text:<\/p>\n

\r\nep58.cfg:\r\nEGM_GIJOE.exe\r\n5859Hasbro.egm \/noend \/track:0 \/singletrack \r\n\r\nep59.cfg:\r\nEGM_GIJOE.exe\r\n5859Hasbro.egm \/noend \/track:1 \/singletrack \r\n<\/pre>\n
The big EGM file starts with the string “Egenie Player”. After that, I see absolutely no clues. The supporting EGM_GIJOE.exe file has some interesting strings: “Decore Bits Per Pixel” (I know I have seen “Decore” used to mean “decoding core” in some libraries), “Egenie Player – %s, Version:%s”, “4th June 2002”, a list of common  FourCC tags seen in AVI files, “Brought to you by Martin, Patrick Bob and Bren” (do you suppose “Patrick Bob” is one person’s name?), a list of command line options…<\/p>\n
Aha! A URL: http:\\\\www.e-genie.tv (yep, backslashes, not forward slashes). e-genie.tv seems to redirect to mygenie.tv, which… doesn’t appear to be strictly related to video technology these days.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
I found a weird little multimedia format on a 3-disc set of G.I. Joe discs<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3755","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/multimedia.cx\/eggs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3755","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/multimedia.cx\/eggs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/multimedia.cx\/eggs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/multimedia.cx\/eggs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/multimedia.cx\/eggs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3755"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/multimedia.cx\/eggs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3755\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3764,"href":"https:\/\/multimedia.cx\/eggs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3755\/revisions\/3764"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/multimedia.cx\/eggs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3755"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/multimedia.cx\/eggs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3755"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/multimedia.cx\/eggs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3755"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}