Multimedia Exploration Journal: November 27, 2002
I've been at it again, purchasing absurd amounts of old software.
Today I picked up 13 titles at one shop. Here is a cursory investigation.
1: Movie CD
First up is a "Movie CD" of Macross Plus. I thought maybe it was a VCD.
But it definitely is not. The CD has one big AVI and software to play it
in Windows 3.1 or 95. The codec is 'mvi2' which is not listed at
fourcc.org (although 'mv12' is listed with no other information). I see
that there was some discussion about this codec on the MPlayer users list
back in July, and there is a sample AVI file on the MPlayer samples FTP.
Here is a page with some information about the codec.
To give you an idea of the age and the probable level of sophistication,
this is from the intro paragraph: "Another new codec has stepped up to
challenge the dominance of Cinepak and Indeo."
There is a company at motionpixels.com. But if it is still the same
company, they radically shifted their business focus sometime ago. No
trace of codec technology.
Curious item about the big AVI file: It has several JUNK chunks which
contain the string "David Whipple/Christian Huygen" over and over and over
again. There is a page about their achievements
here.
The article claims that the algorithm is patented but a patent search
didn't turn up anything. There is also a very curious reference to these
people on this page.
The latter makes me wonder if this codec was used for games.
[Link:
AVI samples using MVI2]
2: LucasArts Sampler
I found a LucasArts Entertainment sampler CD-ROM with demos of Afterlife,
Tie Fighter, and Mortimer. The reason I picked this up is that several
Lucasarts games use a game engine called SCUMM which is known to have a
custom animation format. The Afterlife demo does not appear to contain any
animations. The Mortimer demo contains many .san and .nut files which,
according to
this page
are cutscene and font resource files formats, respectively. They have a
familiar chunked format. The Tie Fighter demo does not have any
recognizable animations, but lots of Creative voice (VOC) files, just like
the full game.
The CD-ROM also has a bunch of Quicktime videos including some schlocky
virtual reality videos with Cinepak/PCM. There is also a directory with a
bunch of Chrysler/Plymouth car commercials (who apparently sponsored the
CD-ROM).
[Link:
LucasArts SAN sample files]
3: Microsoft Interactive CD Sampler
No surprises here. Lots of AVI files
with Cinepak, MS Video-1, Indeo 3.2, Indeo 4.1, and even raw RGB video,
all with linear PCM.
Did you know that Microsoft published a rock climbing simulation? It is
entitled "Microsoft Beyond the Limit Ultimate Climb". The Indeo 3.2-encoded
AVI trailer provides amusement for authentic, real-life rock climbers. Moving
right along...
4: Eidos Demos
I was curious to know if Eidos games have any common media
format. The disc has an AVI trailer for the game Daikatana. You may recall
that when this game was released in 1999 it was widely regarded as very
late and very bad. If you can believe it, the trailer was encoded in MS
Video-1. This was 1999, remember. There is another AVI trailer but for a
game called Anachronox. This is in Indeo 5.
The directory TOMB4 (presumably a Tomb Raider title) contains the Win32
Smacker codec DLL. This leads me to believe that the game uses Smacker
video files.
[Link:
Smacker samples]
The disc also has subdirectories for FORMULA1, KAIN, OMIKRON, REVENANT,
TOMB3, TRGOLD, TR2GOLD, ThiefGold, abomination, commandos, cutthroats, and
gangsters. They each have a single executable, probably self-extracting
and self-installing.
Followup: Gabucino has offered the following intelligence on the Thief
series:
- Thief 1 and Gold: 320x200 (or so) Indeo5 AVIs with uncompressed PCM
- Thief 2: 640x480 Indeo5 (!). Even my K6/2-500 would struggle decoding it,
if it weren't for [MPlayer video target]
mga_vid
Critical Path, starring
Eileen Weisinger
as Kat. Ever hear of her? No?
Well, that's not exactly unusual for early multimedia titles. Anyway, the
game is comprised of QT files (Cinepak at a painful 240x180, and PCM
audio), BMP files, and some WAV files.
With the help of a Quicktime-capable multimedia player, you can get the basic gist
of what looks like a very short game. Basically it's just a series of
Quicktime movies which let you make a life-or-death decision at certain
points.
This game is 3 CD-ROMs. The game still packages
many files together in .TRE resource files like Wing Commander III and IV
but the format is completely different than the earlier format. The game
uses Electronic Arts' WVE and UV2 formats.
The box also mentions Dolby Surround.
[Link:
EA WVE sample files]
Copyright 1994 by Bullfrog software. I really had no reason
to suspect that this game had any multimedia but it was from 1994, came on
a CD-ROM, and was available at the used shop for 1 dollar. The game has a
number of .DAT files which certainly appear to be FLI files, except that
they will not play in any known FLI player. This will require further
examination.
Followup: The files use a slightly modified variant of the FLI format.
An explanation and several samples can be found here:
http://mplayerhq.hu/MPlayer/samples/game-formats/magiccarpet-fli/
8: SI Sports Almanac
Sports Illustrated 1995 Multimedia Almanac. What do you expect? 89
Quicktime files. Almost all of them are Cinepak. But there are some RLE
and SMC videos, too.
The game is by Creative Multimedia Corporation
and bears the Multimedia PC (MPC) logo, so it must have some kind of video
files. Let's look...oh boy...625 Quicktime files. I better go make some
popcorn.
The files are a mish-mash of QT RLE, SMC, and Cinepak with PCM. This is
getting to be a common theme. Maybe Apple knew what they were doing by
including a range on codecs with QT for different applications.
Chaos Control (not to be confused with the previous game). DOS game.
Published by Philips. Created by Infogrames/I-Motion. Sounds like it could
have some FMV. (But the game's requirements state specifically that it
does not support Gravis sound cards; how bogus is that?) The box copy
lists the game's key features as:
- Easy installation
- Awesome 3-D and Japanese state-of-the-art animation (whatever that
means)
The CD-ROM contains a game executable, an installation executable, a
readme.txt file, and a 200MB chaos.gb file. This resource file begins with
an incredibly simple file index which includes filename, absolute offset
in resource, and file length. A lot of the files have an extension of smp.
Other extensions include bin, mcg, a3, fla, and mux. The smp files are
just Creative Voice (VOC) files (maybe the game just fed VOC files
straight into the Sound Blaster software API which, as I recall, was
difficult to emulate on the Gravis Ultrasound).
The mux files sound interesting because of filenames like credits.mux and
intro1.mux. A mux file has the numbers 320 and 200 encoded in its header,
but that is the only pattern that has jumped out at me so far.
More information on the MUX format can be found in
"1-Hit Wonder" Formats.
[Link:
MUX samples from Chaos Control]
"The All-New Interactive ER Game." 2 discs. This is yet another
Quicktime-based game. However, it is the first one I have seen that uses
Sorenson video! All of the video is SVQ1. All of the audio is Qualcomm
Qclp. I guess this makes sense since Qualcomm's codec is reputed to be
great for compressing speech and that's what the audio in this game
primarily consists of.
Westwood Studios VQA movie files and AUD audio files,
all contained in .MIX resource files. The specs for these files are mostly
available already.
[Link:
Westwood VQA samples]
13: Command & Conquer: The Covert Operations (MobyGames entry)
This is an expansion set for C&C. More VQA and AUD media in MIX resource files.
[Link:
Westwood VQA samples]
by Mike Melanson (mike at multimedia.cx).
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