Extracting from Realms of Chaos

[spikey]

Hey King Duke,

Very interested, thank you for your hard work!

What I'm most interested in is if the levels in the beta version, which seem to be at least partially unused and not even in the beta (i.e. Alabama Smith levels) could be playable somehow, or AT LEAST viewed.

[K1n9_Duk3]

You probably won't be able to view the beta levels with my level viewer as the tile graphics appear to be EGA graphics (probably in the format used by Monster Bash) and the tiles of the release version are VGA. In addition, the level format of the release version stores a 256-color VGA palette at the beginning of the file, which is not very likely to be present in the beta, as it appears to be a 16-color game.

However, there is a chance that the level format used in the beta is similar to the format of the release version (which, in turn, is actually very similar to the Monster Bash level format). See the ModdingWiki for further information.

As I don't have the beta version, I cannot help you any further.

[MrFlibble]

I'm suddenly interested in the registered version preview images shown in the shareware version. Is there a way to extract/convert them? I unpacked the contents of ROCSW.DAT but I have no idea what format is used for the images and how to combine image and palette data to get proper output.

[Malvineous]

The *.vga files look like raw 320x200 images. The palette appears to be at the start of the file, so they are 64768 bytes (768 byte palette + 320*200 = 64000 bytes).

I converted the .vga files with dd and Camoto on a Linux system like this:

Code: Select all

# Skip first 768 bytes and copy the rest into a .raw file
for I in *.vga; do echo $I; dd if=$I of=out/`basename $I .vga`.raw skip=768 bs=1 count=64000; done
# Copy the first 768 bytes only into a .pal file
for I in *.vga; do echo $I; dd if=$I of=out/`basename $I .vga`.pal bs=1 count=768; done
cd out
# Convert .raw with .pal into .png
for I in *.raw; do gameimg $I -x `basename $I .raw`.png -t img-vga-raw-fullscreen; done

There only seem to be two preview pics in the version I have.

[K1n9_Duk3]

Here are some more:

led01.bg.png

led02.bg.png

led03.bg.png

led04.bg.png

led05.bg.png

led06.bg.png

led07.bg.png

Not sure if any of these are ever shown in the game, since these are actually tileset files and not full-screen images. At least led07.bg appears to be unused, as it doesn't come with a matching .pal file. I used led06.pal instead.

By the way, my editor for Duke Nukem II would also have been able to convert the .vga files. I actually used this tool to create the modified screens in the ROC minimod that I posted here a few years ago.

[MrFlibble]

Thanks guys!!! ^_^ (sorry for the late reply, had a busy fortnight)

Not sure if any of these are ever shown in the game, since these are actually tileset files and not full-screen images. At least led07.bg appears to be unused, as it doesn't come with a matching .pal file. I used led06.pal instead.

These are the preview shots shown in the ordering information section of the shareware version (as documented here), except for the led07 image which appears to be a cleaned up screenshot without the promo text welded onto it.