RGB Classic Games Forum

Hi again. For In Search of Dr. Riptide, I am interested in the sprite graphics format and also how to extract the sprites while keeping their original filenames. The graphics (and other data) are stored in the riptide.dat file. I extracted the CMF music and VOC sound effects easily enough (Ripper6 was also able to extract those files). The DAT file has some PCS PC Speaker sound effect files, PCX files which are fullscreen images, and sprites and/or animations which are..."L" files? For example, there's "TENT_IN.L" and "TENT_OUT.L" which I think somehow form the animation for the octopus tentacle moving into and out of the caves... After some more poking around with a hex editor, I was able to view some graphics, including a few unused sprites.

The game had a shareware release, and there are 2 versions: 1.0 and 1.1. Only the shareware release has a 1.1 version (as far as I know). Edit: It turns out that a Registered v1.1 release does in fact exist, although it was incredibly hard for me to find it. The registered version is abandonware. The 1.0 and 1.1 DAT files are very slightly different sizes. Shareware versions are here: https://www.dropbox.com/sh/741eapdhf2a7 ... NSx7a?dl=0

Edit: Someone found this page, which has information on the file formats: http://sysmagazine.com/posts/154781/

Thanks for posting this info! I have created a ModdingWiki page for Dr. Riptide and I have just added support for editing RIPTIDE.DAT to Camoto.

If you are able to compile the c++11 branch of libgamearchive.git from source, then the command "gamearch /path/to/riptide.dat -X" will extract all the files into the current directory, with their original names. The .dat file stores the last-modified date for each file, but this is ignored for the time being.

I've just released a specialised tool for Dr.Riptide ... Together with srtuss we figured out all parts that were missing ... with this tool you can look at and listen to all assets of the game (srtuss made the adlib emulator/cmf player), including maps, export sprite-"loops" as they called them (.L files) as animated gif or static png. It also shows the palettes of each map animated. Palette rotation is used for the bubbles in the background tiles. We also mapped all objects of the game to their ID in the game (this info is hardcoded in the exe) and deciphered all other bytes of the map files (exept the very last byte) so there is nothing in the way of a remake of In Search of Dr.Riptide now anymore.

https://github.com/movAX13h/DrRiptideDissected
The repo also contains 2 versions of the original game: 1.0 full (contains all maps) and 1.1 shareware (only stage 1 maps).
The release zip files contain tool binaries and the full game dat file, ready to run.

Have fun!

@malvineous: I was too lazy to format the file descriptions for the wiki so I put links there - I hope that's ok.

Very useful tool, thanks!

There is also a 1.1 of the full version. The game was never released as freeware (although I don't know if the game's owners would care enough to DMCA it).