RGB Classic Games Forum

Here's a funny idea that I had a few days ago:
I could record my work on old games (mostly reading hex dump and writing converters) and upload these videos, so people can see the how this actually works. These can be 10 minutes or 3 hours, depending on the difficulty and complexity of th formats.

Would anyone here be interested in such videos? If yes, I'd be glad to accept suggestions for what games I should dissect.

It's a nice idea, but personally I learn much better from reading at my own pace than I do from watching at someone else's pace. So I would much rather read something with lots of screenshots than watch a video. But perhaps if you can capture an entire concept in a short 10-minute or so video, it might be ok? Whatever you do, make sure you edit the videos and do a few takes so that you don't fall into the trap of so many video tutorials, where it looks like the whole thing was done in a single shot, mistakes and all. It makes it difficult to watch if it looks like the person who created the video didn't put a lot of effort into it.

If you're looking for suggestions about which games to investigate, my vote goes towards Doofus, God of Thunder or Vinyl Goddess From Mars, simply because these games have not been reverse engineered yet.

Malvineous wrote:It's a nice idea, but personally I learn much better from reading at my own pace than I do from watching at someone else's pace. So I would much rather read something with lots of screenshots than watch a video. But perhaps if you can capture an entire concept in a short 10-minute or so video, it might be ok? Whatever you do, make sure you edit the videos and do a few takes so that you don't fall into the trap of so many video tutorials, where it looks like the whole thing was done in a single shot, mistakes and all. It makes it difficult to watch if it looks like the person who created the video didn't put a lot of effort into it.

If you're looking for suggestions about which games to investigate, my vote goes towards Doofus, God of Thunder or Vinyl Goddess From Mars, simply because these games have not been reverse engineered yet.

I created a first episode (that includes one mistake) and spoke a voiceover for it. But idk how to properly put the voiceover onto the footage so it's in synch. I'm not into video editing

(Also I'm not the best narrator and I hate my German accent)

I don't think your accent is the problem - I don't get any sound at all! Did you include the voiceover?

Since you're on Windows, can you use Windows Movie Maker to apply the voiceover? Otherwise you can do it the cheap way, and watch your video while you read out and record your voiceover, then merge ("mux") the two.

Malvineous wrote:I don't think your accent is the problem - I don't get any sound at all! Did you include the voiceover?

Since you're on Windows, can you use Windows Movie Maker to apply the voiceover? Otherwise you can do it the cheap way, and watch your video while you read out and record your voiceover, then merge ("mux") the two.

I did the voiceover seperately. Since I'm unable to apply it, the video is silent.

I normally use windows movie maker for such things, but it can't render better than 480p.

Malvineous wrote:It's a nice idea, but personally I learn much better from reading at my own pace than I do from watching at someone else's pace. So I would much rather read something with lots of screenshots than watch a video.

I agree, I think the screenshots plus text description format would work better.

Well, then I'll create a blog or something with lessons on different datatypes and how to identify and reverse engineer them.


Other new on documenting my work: I've started setting up a database for my Blizzard Archive and think I'm on the right path for a usable way of storing all this data.

I quickly wrote a textual version of the first episode (without going deep into the programming aspects):

http://kultcds.com/FOFF/index.php?id=1

I'd be glad to get some feedback

That's a really nice tutorial! I definitely prefer the text and screenshots to a video - I can go at my own pace. I look forward to reading more of them!

From a purely self-promotional aspect, it'd be great if you had a link to libgamearchive at the end of this post for those who understand basic C++. This library was designed to allow archive formats just like the one in your tutorial to be edited, so if someone has just reverse engineered a new archive format they might be interested in adding it to libgamearchive instead of writing their own extraction tool from scratch. All the "hard" stuff like making room for larger replacement files (and updating the offsets of all the other files) has been taken care of in this library so you get a lot of functionality for not too much work.

Malvineous wrote:That's a really nice tutorial! I definitely prefer the text and screenshots to a video - I can go at my own pace. I look forward to reading more of them!

From a purely self-promotional aspect, it'd be great if you had a link to libgamearchive at the end of this post for those who understand basic C++. This library was designed to allow archive formats just like the one in your tutorial to be edited, so if someone has just reverse engineered a new archive format they might be interested in adding it to libgamearchive instead of writing their own extraction tool from scratch. All the "hard" stuff like making room for larger replacement files (and updating the offsets of all the other files) has been taken care of in this library so you get a lot of functionality for not too much work.

I will add that link to the navigation on the left.

I have already written a list of formats that I will explain:
http://kultcds.com/FOFF/Images/Misc/3WeeksPlan.jpg

Todays format will be Warcraft's WAR format, that is again a pretty simple archive format, but has some compression.
Tomorrow I'll explain how to break the encryption of Arena's INF files.
And afer that we'll finally get some colorful images.

Hallfiry wrote:I quickly wrote a textual version of the first episode (without going deep into the programming aspects):

http://kultcds.com/FOFF/index.php?id=1

I'd be glad to get some feedback

I like it a lot! Also nice to see that you plan so far ahead ^_^

I procrastinated a little bit the last week, but I'll write a new tutorial in the next few hours. It will feature some nice pictures

Because I tend to post random information on so many websites (KultCDs, BetaArchive, ClassicDosGames, Offiical Past Elder Scrolls Games Forum,...), I decided to create a blog:

http://hallfiry.blogspot.com

I'll post updates of all my projects there, be it Blizzard, KKnD, KultCDs, File Formats, or whatever.

EDIT:

New tutorial is up:
http://kultcds.com/FOFF/index.php?id=3

I find it a little bit sloppier than the other ones, but I didn't want to make it too long.

Hallfiry wrote:Because I tend to post random information on so many websites (KultCDs, BetaArchive, ClassicDosGames, Offiical Past Elder Scrolls Games Forum,...), I decided to create a blog:

http://hallfiry.blogspot.com

I'll post updates of all my projects there, be it Blizzard, KKnD, KultCDs, File Formats, or whatever.

That's an excellent idea! Your dedication and efforts are very much appreciated, thanks!