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List:       xine-codec-devel
Subject:    [codec-devel] Vintage Multimedia Report #2
From:       Mike Melanson <melanson () pcisys ! net>
Date:       2002-11-28 5:45:59
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Hi,
	Continuing for earlier message...


6.
Wing Commander Prophecy. 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.


7.
Magic Carpet. 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.


8.
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.


9.
The C.H.A.O.S. Continuum. 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.


10.
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.


11.
Code Blue. "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. A'rpi: can MPlayer handle Qclp yet? We used to
scrounge for Qclp samples but now I have hundreds of them.


12.
Command & Conquer. Westwood Studios VQA movie files and AUD audio files,
all contained in .MIX resource files. The specs for these files are mostly
available already.

It is curious that the side of the C&C box has a picture of a tall
building exploding.


13.
Command & Conquer: The Covert Operations. This is an expansion set for
C&C. More VQA and AUD media in MIX files.


	That's all I got on this trip, but only because it's all I could
carry out of the store. They still have plenty more.

	Thanks for sitting through all of that...
--
	-Mike Melanson




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