RSS Parrot

Looking at Winamp codebase

https://codecs.multimedia.cx/2024/10/looking-at-winamp-codebase/

Published: October 4, 2024 16:48

Breaking news from the Slowpoke News Channel™: a source code base for Winamp has been released (just last month). So it’s a good occasion to talk about it and what interesting (for me) things can be found in the third-party libraries. I think I used the…

A quick look at Death Rally HAF

https://codecs.multimedia.cx/2024/09/a-quick-look-at-death-rally-haf/

Published: September 27, 2024 17:06

I tried to look at it before but since the game uses that special 32-bit DOS extender (PMODE/W if anybody’s curious), I gave up. As I mentioned in one of previous posts, I need either to find a way to dump unpacked and properly loaded executable reliably…

A cursory glance at TealMovie

https://codecs.multimedia.cx/2024/09/a-cursory-glance-at-tealmovie/

Published: September 23, 2024 17:57

Apparently there’s such format for Palm so one could play videos on such devices as well (PocketPC devices got so powerful that they could even play 320×240 MPEG-4 ASP videos—provided you used some good opensource player like TCPMP and not something like…

Announcing na_game_tool 0.2.0

https://codecs.multimedia.cx/2024/09/announcing-na_game_tool-0-2-0/

Published: September 14, 2024 10:32

As hinted in my previous posts, I’ve released na_game_tool version 0.2.0. Of course it is available at its dedicated page (and now there’s a link to that page in the “Multimedia Projects” link category). Here I’d like to talk about what’s changed in it and…

A look on some of Psygnosis formats

https://codecs.multimedia.cx/2024/09/a-look-on-some-of-psygnosis-formats/

Published: September 12, 2024 17:12

This British company had developed quite an amount of good games itself and published even more. As I mentioned in one of my previous posts, I’d like to take a look at some of those (after both seeing their games mentioned in dexvert unsupported formats…

On over- and under-engineered codecs

https://codecs.multimedia.cx/2024/09/on-over-and-under-engineered-codecs/

Published: September 10, 2024 17:16

Since my last post got many comments (more than one counts as many here) about various codecs, I feel I need to clarify my views on what I see as over-engineered codec as well as under-engineered codec. First of all, let’s define what does not make a codec…

The most overengineered game codec

https://codecs.multimedia.cx/2024/09/the-most-overengineered-game-codec/

Published: September 7, 2024 17:05

…as I’ve seen so far, of course, but the chances for it to keep this title are good. I’m talking about XCF format (found in ACF files of Time Commando game developed by Adeline Software). For starters, the format allows various commands that are related to…

Self-fulfilling excuses

https://codecs.multimedia.cx/2024/08/self-fulfilling-excuses/

Published: August 31, 2024 13:49

There’s this old but annoying (and sometimes infuriating) thing called self-fulfilling excuses. Essentially it’s when somebody uses a deferred reasoning “this thing will not work, because I’ll be stonewalling it until it fails, and then I can proudly claim…

SMS is a new AVI

https://codecs.multimedia.cx/2024/08/sms-is-a-new-avi/

Published: August 28, 2024 16:07

Since I’m still in a search of video formats for my na_game_tool, I happened to look at Jagged Alliance: Deadly Games and found an SMS file there (and then more for a demo version of Nemesis: The Wizardry Adventure). The file starts with BLAH magic…

Looking at Nova Logic FMV formats

https://codecs.multimedia.cx/2024/08/looking-at-nova-logic-fmv-formats/

Published: August 23, 2024 16:56

So there’s this company known mostly for helicopter simulators and those games use KDV format for animation. That alone is enough to make me look at the formats and what have I found? the original Comanche game used a simple FMV based on PCX RLE. It was…

On some German town names

https://codecs.multimedia.cx/2024/08/on-some-german-town-names/

Published: August 19, 2024 16:29

One of my hobbies is travelling around and during my travels I see names that I find amusing like Geilhausen which can be translated as “Gay/kewl housing” or Waldfischbach (which translates to “forest fish brook” and it makes me think about what special…