Wednesday, December 15, 2010

Some Carmen Images

Well, we don't support Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego? yet beyond showing images. But we added support for the DOS images of Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego? Deluxe Edition yesterday, so I figured I'd show it off. Also, I don't update my blog enough, so here's a post.

Where Wile E. Coyote Shops

Police Squad! ...In 256 Colors


These are the same (well, similar) images from the intro of the two games. The former is in EGA from Deluxe and the latter in VGA from v2. They went full screen for Deluxe game and decided to size it down for Windows (The first image is actually three 640x160 images put together).

Surprisingly (or I guess I shouldn't be surprised considering how much Brøderbund likes to reuse things), the CSWorld Deluxe archive format is the same one used in Prince of Persia 2!

I cracked the archive format before I realized PoP2 used it, so I only found this info out afterward. Same with the simple SND resource format. I checked out the specs for the bitmap decompressor and applied a modified version to the ScummVM source (thanks to fuzzie for helping figure out the data was EGA planar). And lo and behold, it uses the exact same modified LZ decompression that was used in all other Mohawk games (minus Riven). It looks like the planar part isn't in PoP, but I'm not sure.

One last note: We will not support Prince of Persia 1/2 in ScummVM no matter how much you ask. ;)

3 comments:

md5 said...

Nice work!

Now, will you support PoP? :PPP

Rowan Lipkovits said...

While on the subject of MOHAWK, I came across this fellow's CV -- I presume they've been approached, as they seem an authority on the topic?

http://www.linkedin.com/pub/glenn-axworthy/12/2ba/7a

clone2727 said...

@Accordion Hero: Thanks for the link. We haven't spoken with him, but have spoken with another Mohawk developer. It's probably worth shooting him an e-mail.