quote:

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Originally posted by Del

quote:

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Originally posted by cappuchok
A quick look through MobyGames seems to suggest that one or both of the original programmers are now working at Mass Media (website).

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Where did you see that? I tried looking for Ian Sabine & Rob Toone, but didn't find anything?

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Ah, right. I only made a cursory glance over the mobygames stats. I'll try contacting Mass Media tomorrow and see if there's any interest

   

quote:

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Originally posted by Del
Ah, right. I only made a cursory glance over the mobygames stats. I'll try contacting Mass Media tomorrow and see if there's any interest

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Some tests. They are quite dark for some reason, so there's also some other palette modifications going on, which I am working on. I used to following quick & dirty perl script to create the images:

code:

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#!/usr/bin/perl

use GD;

use warnings;
use diagnostics;

my $pal = shift || &usage;
my $dat = shift || &usage;
my $out = shift || &usage;

my $image = new GD::Image(320, 200);

#Open the PALette and create the color-table
open (PAL, $pal) or die $pal;

$offset = 0;

until ( eof(PAL) ) {
   read(PAL, $record, 3) == 3 or die "short read\n";
   $col = unpack("H6", $record);
   $color = $image->colorResolve(
                          hex(substr($col,0,2)),
                          hex(substr($col,2,2)),
                          hex(substr($col,4,2))
                         );
   $colors{substr("00".(sprintf "%x", $offset++), -2)} = $color;
}

#Open the DATa and set pixels to correct color from table
open (DAT, $dat) or die $dat;

$a = 0;

while ( not eof(DAT) ) {
    read(DAT, $record, 1) == 1 or die "short read\n";
   
   $index = substr("00".unpack("H2", $record),-2);
   
   $y = int($a / 320);
   $x = $a++ % 320;
   $color = $colors{$index};
   $image->setPixel($x,$y,$color);
}

#Create png-file
open (OUT, ">", $out) or die "$out: $!";
binmode OUT;
print OUT $image->png;
close(OUT);

sub usage {
   warn "Usage: $0 .PAL-file .DAT-file out.png\n";
   warn "The .DAT-file must be de-RNC'd\n";
   exit(0);
}

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I'm not that great a programmer, but probaby you need to bitshift the rgb pal values to make it lighter? Just a guess though.

clem

   

quote:

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Originally posted by clem
I'm not that great a programmer, but probaby you need to bitshift the rgb pal values to make it lighter? Just a guess though.

clem

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Of course





I know very little about VGA & DOS internals, so these parts are still new to me... The change is this:

code:

---

   $color = $image->colorResolve(
                          hex(substr($col,0,2)) << 2,
                          hex(substr($col,2,2)) << 2,
                          hex(substr($col,4,2)) << 2
                         );

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Greeting gents, nice work so far.
This brings back very old memories as it was my first game!
Someone mentioned that they thought it was written in Borland C, in fact it was written in 100% assembler, 80186 I believe.

   

Hi, nice to meet you!

Thanks for the headsup on the 100% assembly. It helps to know that it's coded by hand.

I'm currently working on identifying file-opens and renaming labels in the disassembly, to get a better overall view of the structure of the program. There's quite a bit of work ahead, but I am beginning to get an idea of how to go about it. I've identified the parts that contain the introduction and the RNC-unpacking.

   

Nice stuff, what about opening a blog or WIKI for your RE experiment?

   

There's always the new Reverse Engineering Wiki at http://rewiki.regengedanken.de/wiki/Main_Page

I confess that I'd already put in an entry for the .SPR file format based on your forum posting. It could certainly use some fleshing out if you're interested.

   

Thanks dreammaster, I've been really busy with work these last few weeks, I have a lot of notes in text files that will be put into the wiki as soon as I have 10 minutes of spare time. Seems like you're doing quite well also! We have to compare notes at some point.

I have some notes as well that are not on the wiki, that you'd most likely be intersted in.

   

quote:

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Originally posted by Del
I have some notes as well that are not on the wiki, that you'd most likely be intersted in.

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quote:

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Originally posted by john_doe

quote:

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Originally posted by clem
BASS also has some RNC algorithm afaik, I wonder if that is coincidence...

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Yes, probably. RNC is a third-party compression algorithm/library that was used by some games around that time (mid 90es). Think of it as the zlib of that time

@Del:
You can find decompression code for RNC method 2 in the BASS sources, I can send you C++ code to decompress method 1 if you want.

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code:

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Short: RNC ProPack - multi-format file packer
Version: 2.08
Uploader: iancourt@hotmail.com (Ian Court)
Author: Rob Northen Computing
Type: util/pack

This is the final release of PRO-PACK from Rob Northen Computing. Since Rob Northen Computing are nolonger trading, this utility has become freely distributable.

This may be particularly useful for Amiga users as this is the packer that Sensible Software used for the data files in SWOS. Now you can edit those teams and actually save them back to disk in crunched format - no need to delete other team files to fit edited teams on the disk, and no crashes due to internal buffers being filled!

This is the complete RNC PRO-PACK distribution, directly from Rob  Northen Computing, which also contains useful assembler code.



The archive contains:

PPIBM.EXE                  - File packer (PC 286 version)
PPAMI.EXE                  - file packer (Amiga version)
PP.DOC                     - PRO-PACK manual
SOURCE (dir)               - Assembler unpack source files
    IBMPC (dir)
        RNC_1.ASM          - 8086 Method 1
        RNC_2.ASM          - 8086 Method 2
    MC68000 (dir)
        RNC_1C.S           - MC68000 Method 1 Compact Version (consoles)
        RNC_2C.S           - MC68000 Method 2 Compact Version (consoles)
        RNC_1.S            - MC68000 Method 1
        RNC_2.S            - MC68000 Method 2
    GAMEBOY (dir)
        RNC_2.S            - Z80 GameBoy Method 2
    SUPERNES (dir)
        RNC_1.S            - 65816 Method 1
        RNC_2.S            - 65816 Method 2
    LYNX (dir)
        RNC.MAC            - RNC macros
        RNC_1.SRC          - 65C02 Atari Lynx Method 1
        RNC_2.SRC          - 65C02 Atari Lynx Method 2
    MIPS R4300
        RNC_1.ASM          - Mips R4300 Method 1

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Any news about this RE effort?

I only found this on the RE wiki: http://rewiki.regengedanken.de/wiki/.SPR