Displaying entries for tag: Analysis

An Old New World


The Sword Swallower enemy in action. When it was released back in 1993, Disney's Aladdin for the Sega Genesis (or Mega Drive, depending on which side of the pond you lived on through the early 90's) was really a visually striking game.

Powered by what eventually became known as "Digicel" technology, along with a solid selection of middleware and some impressive talent, Aladdin managed to set itself apart from other Genesis titles of the era. Aladdin's beautifully hand-crafted, surprisingly well-quantized artwork set new expectations for many in the realm of what could be accomplished on Genesis hardware. Read more...


Saturn Quake


A secret level from Saturn Quake. Quake for the Sega Saturn is an interesting port. Actually, rather than really being a port at all, it's Quake completely reconstructed in the SlaveDriver engine, which is the engine also used by Lobotomy Software's console ports of PowerSlave and Duke Nukem 3D.

A few people have expressed interest in being able to recover and/or port the levels from this version of the game, so it's been sitting around on my list of games to take a look at for quite a few years now. I finally got around to taking a look at the LEV files a few weekends ago on a whim, and after a couple more weekends of chipping away at it, it's at a point where it's ready to be included in a Noesis release.

Support in Noesis is nice on its own and can facilitate porting the maps over to other engines (with a good bit of manual effort), but I also want to share all of my findings so far, mostly for the sake of posterity. Read more...


FX Fighter


FX Fighter 2011! A few days ago, I decided to reverse engineer FX Fighter. Being a poor boy, I missed out on most of the Saturn gaming era, and FX Fighter running on my old 486 was my first actual experience with a 3D fighter outside of the arcade. So it'd been sitting on my list of games to reverse for nostalgia's sake, and I figured I'd tackle it one day, hopefully using a nice IDA Pro plugin for DOSBox integration that handled DOS4GW applications. (there is a plugin, but I've had no luck getting it to debug 32-bit DOS apps) But the urge just struck me last weekend, and I decided to go after it armed with nothing but IDA Pro and an old build of DOSBox with its debugger enabled. Now I'm going to write a whole article about the process!

This isn't so much intended to be a file spec, as it is just a direct chronicle of my experiences and findings in figuring the game's formats out, in the actual order of my work/discovery. It's like you're right there scoping through the binary with me! I'll describe all of my approaches and general methodology here, as well, so get ready to digest a lot. Read more...




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