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The Neverhood

gilm — Wed, 20 Jul 2011 19:48:46 +0000

The Neverhood is the best adventure game you (probably) never played. You take the role of Klaymen, a plasticine protagonist unlike any other. Originally released in 1996, by Doug TenNapel (of the Earthworm Jim fame), the game wasn’t a commercial success.

Although a sequel called Skullmonkeys was released on the PSX, the game was pretty much forgotten and Dreamworks stopped future development (including a film that was in the works.)

I have always loved Klaymen and the magnificent soundtrack. I thought of taking some time off to rewrite the game using ScummVM framework and make it available for modern platforms.

The progress I made is available here. A script that unpacks the BLB container files. Each BLB contains background graphics, audio, music, sprites and video (in smk format, supported by ffmpeg). Another script will extract background graphics and convert them into PNGs. The file formats of any of these files is unknown, so you’ll see lots of guesswork in my code.)

See a full collage of all background graphics from The Neverhood.

Plan 9 From Outer Space

gilm — Sun, 17 Apr 2011 18:21:08 +0000

Award-winning picture for the title “Worst Movie Ever Made” was turned into a computer game in 1992 by Gremlin Graphics. I have never managed to sit myself down to watch this film, but its movie poster left such a mark on my teenage self that I kept remembering this name years later.

I am releasing a sprite ripper, which extracts all background graphics and game sprites from the PC version of the game. You have been warned, even the gfx are totally hideous :), but alas, it makes a cool release. Again, code has been written by trial and error, merely by looking at hexdumps of the binary files. Enjoy!

Download: Python script (requires PIL), Game graphic files (PC)

The Case of The Cautious Condor

gilm — Mon, 16 Aug 2010 15:36:51 +0000

The Case of The Cautious Condor is an adventure game in the format of a comic book. It was released in 1989 by Tiger Media Inc, and was available DOS, CDTV and FM-Towns.

My first encounter with Condor was in 1992, while on vacation in Euro Disney with the family. It was in a display set for future of gaming platform, featuring the CD-ROM. It’s been on my mind ever since.

Without an apparent reason, I figured it’s time to extract all sprites and audio banks. The version I chose was the CDTV, but the code works with DOS version as well.

Condor comprises over 200 .RTF file, each contains a CEL sprite, (optionally) a palette and (optionally) an audio stream. Sprites are 32 colors (5 bit palette index), and audio is 14700 hz 8bit mono.

Game logic was implemented in C++ and is in the executable file in full. The following script was rewritten without reverse engineering the game, with pure trial-and-error.

Owners of the CDTV copy are more than welcome to download the python script at extract-condor-assets.py. It will dump all sprites into separate PNG files, and all audio in Microsoft .wav files (requires PIL and sox). Released under GPL license.

Alternatively, you can view all sprites in a kickass collage online.

And remember: Means, Motive and Opportunity!

Toki (Arcade)

gawd — Sun, 13 Sep 2009 14:29:42 +0000

I’ve been making a huge progress with my Toki reverse-engineering project. Toki has been one of my all time favorite games since the day it was added at the arcades. You play a monkey (win!) that can fire bullets from his mouth (epic win!).

All level backgrounds, all parallax secondary backgrounds, correct palettes and most sprites are extracted and converted to PNGs. At the moments the sprites are discovered by trial and error – hoping to find how they are stored in the code. I will release all code as GPL when I’m through.

I wouldn’t have been able to do any of these without the help of Mame. I hope to soon post a post-mortem on this game and its uber cool architecture.

ReadySoft Animation Player

gawd — Sat, 06 Jun 2009 11:59:08 +0000

Readysoft Animation Player was a super fun project I made back in 2006, aiming to port Dragon’s Lair & Space Ace to modern and mobile platforms. The greatest thing about these games (aside the gameplay and superb Bluth animation,) is that they are available for every console, alive or dead, with new versions still being released.

I intend to publish a technical article about Readysoft’s FMV engine, and compare different console versions. It’s part of Gawd’s Museum of Dissected Games, and a detailed autopsy and source code will be uploaded later.

This is a rewrite of the animation code made for the PC platform. The Amiga, Atari ST and Apple IIgs used similar code and graphics. Visit the ReadySoft Animation Player.