I was working on the boss area for stage one. There was something definitely wrong with their automation tool. That or the original project gotten some corruption and they didn't realize it.
Take a look at the boss chars:
The pic on the left is the original ACD palette. There's no way that could be what they wanted
Green hands and face!?
I'm
not changing the pixels in these frames, just the colors associated with them. They match up perfect with the arcade. This means either the palette data got corrupted in the project before pressing or they employed a 3 year old to over see the colors.
In the data track, there multiple instances of the same boss sprites/data. The funny thing is there not all the same in regards to pixel # alignment. They reordered the pixel #'s in the final sprites for some reason and it's not for color recycling or reduction. Weird.
The first boss has issues of crossed colors/pixels and the damn thing is compressed. Looks like I need to figure that out and decompress them.
Do you think that it will be possible to restore some of the missing shades in the background (compared to the original ACD) in the future?
Dunno. I'll need to dig deeper and decompress the tiles.
Edit:
This keeps on getting weirder. Ok, I figured out the decompression routine. Should be simple enough to write an external compressor/decompressor. When the AVE logo is spinning in the beginning/startup of the game, it's loading the first level data. The weird part is that it's loading multiple 192k segments and then decompressing them to arcade card memory. The strange this is that it's using old and almost useless RLE word based compression for PCE format of graphics. It's an old compression method from before '92 for most PCE games. When this game came out, almost all CD games that I know of used the much
more efficient LZSS compression. The second strange part is 192k is usually how SCD games load data. 64k code is left intact of 256k memory and level/data/graphics are loaded usually as a single 192k chunk. Not only that, but these 192k chunks contain some redundant tiles - like the stage was divided up into 3-4 segments. That, and the left over garbage data in the CD track contains tiles and sprites from a '91 CD game. Just further proof in my mind that this was an old SCD project.
Another thing. In the data track, there are tons of sheets of uncompressed sprites - all the bosses and enemies. Of course the game doesn't load these for some odd reason. But the peculiar thing I noticed, using a palette match, is that those uncompressed sprites have some of the color #'s in different places. Given that some of the sprites really do have the wrong colors in certain places of the final game definitely leads me to believe whoever was responsible for those sprites, their graphics didn't end up making it into the AC ram. Instead the originals were used. Speculation of course, but things are fitting together suspiciously well.
Topic: Retooling Striders palette (Read 831 times)
