Jump to content

Rewriting Cryo's Dune 1 : it seems possible !!!

Monsieur OUXX

By Monsieur OUXX
in Dune Editing

 Share

Recommended Posts

stefanhendriks

stefanhendriks

Posted
Posted

that was ofcourse the 'intention' when you are in fly mode, give the 3d feel i gues.

Anyway, i think a remake would be cool, but a 3d engine, that would really be nice. Using HDR and such ;) You give me lightning effects aka HL2 or NFS: Most Wanted, and i'll dr00l already ! :)

Davidu

Davidu

Posted
Posted

Possibly, but I think you'll lose the magic of the 256 colors. Why? Because with 256 colors you knew it was a story, a game. That was the magic of all the old games. The new games tend to be too realistic, and then.. well... it's not a story anymore, it's a reality surogate.

Monsieur OUXX

Monsieur OUXX

Posted
  • Author
Posted
a 3d engine, that would really be nice.

Possibly, but I think you'll lose the magic of the 256 colors

Guys, I think you both have good arguments (sincerely) BUT  :D I want this thread to be strictly technical.

At this time, i am doing real investigation to retrieve these mysterious technologies back from the past, and I'd like it to be as fast as possible. No time to loose!  8)

So, please, don't post messages related to eventual future features. Another thread could be created soon?

If you have any clues concerning :

- the HSQ compression method

- the source code of RDOSplay (an old utility that performs the "unhsq" operation)

- a way to contact Roman Dolejsi (to ask him about Rdosplay)

- the place where RDOSplay source code appears in ZDoom source code

- a way to contact the guys who programmed ZDoom (to ask them about RDosplay)

... please tell me !!!

Thanks

Davidu

Davidu

Posted
Posted

LONG LIVE GOOGLE:

Linux-Net Archive: Ethertalk / Localtalk routing

Roman Dolejsi (roman@sorry.vse.cz) Tue, 19 Mar 1996 19:37:18 +0100 (GMT+0100).

Messages sorted by: [ date ][ thread ][ subject ][ author ]; Next message: ...

I hope the adress works.

Monsieur OUXX

Monsieur OUXX

Posted
  • Author
Posted

Being totally mad, i tried to uncompile (i'm ashame of myself) RdosPlay, using dcc.

Unfortunately, it didn't work.

I expected it, because this program  was written by a real old-school geek, probably using weird assembly code, forbidden memory access and peripherals management  ;D

It's very frustrating, because on many websites one can find "Thanks to Roman Dolejsi", but one can't contact him.

As if he had contributed to all the projects in the universe before suddenly vanishing around the year 2000  ::)

Monsieur OUXX

Monsieur OUXX

Posted
  • Author
Posted

Depending on how desperate you are, he has left a physical address

I didn't want to do that, but I finally wrote him a letter, because all other ways seem to be broken.

But this address is also 8 years old, he's probably relocated....

Monsieur OUXX

Monsieur OUXX

Posted
  • Author
Posted

NEWS FROM THE FRONT :

Though it seems impossible to find back that unhsq program, i tried to read from the data files of the game by mylself.

Here are the clues that I have at this time :

HSQ FILES

Looking into HSQ files, I noticed that some part of the data was directly readable (it hasn't been transformed by the HSQ compressor)

Example :

(PHRASE11.HSQ, offset 1004)

"I'm ..the Duk.Leto ..Atreides, your f.Ca.r"  stands for "I'm the Duke Leto Atreides, your father"

At the same time, other parts of the file (others entences, for example), are totally mixed up.

One can also notice that :

- "I'm", "the", "your" (very common words)

- "Atreides", "Leto" (common words in a Dune game)

are intact, while :

- "father" and "Duke" (rare words)

are broken.

So what do we have? Common words are conserved by the compression process, while rare ones are broken.

All words stay in the same order.

=> I thought HSQ method could be similar to LZW method, one of the most popular method at this ime (1992)

LZW : look at http://www.dogma.net/markn/articles/lzw/lzw.htm

I thought it couldn't be RLE method because there does'nt seem to be any "escape code" character, announcing the following repetition, but maybe I'm wrong because I don't know much about the implementation tricks of this method.

What did I do then?

I wrote an LZW "uncompress" program in Java, but it didn't give any result.

I modified my program to try uncompresing data from a particular offset in the file (because there seemed to be a "header zone" at the beginning, with a particular structure), but it didn't work neither (tried from offsets 0 to 2000)

That's it for my HSQ trials.

BIN file

There is a BIN file in the directory. It is quite remarkable, because there is only one and it is tiny (approx. 792 bytes)

It's internal structure is also remarkable, because there is a 00 between every bytes, and sometimes (at a regular frequency), there are two 00  ("00 00").

I thoght of the LZW library/vocabulary table, but it's too small.

I also thought of a palette file (because of it's size : approx. 768 bytes), but there are to many 00's...

So what could it be? Why is it called "bin" while it clearly seems to be a data file ?

Monsieur OUXX

Monsieur OUXX

Posted
  • Author
Posted

NEWS FROM THE FRONT

The BIN file seems to be of little importance, because I realized that it is probably a file containing the key codes of an AT keyboard.

It was probably used for compatibility.

vidiware

vidiware

Posted
Posted

Tried this email adress? The ZDOOM Main programmer email found in a ZDOOM source file:

Randy Heit

rheit@iastate.edu

Quote from zdoom changelog:

Added the writeopl command to write a song in RDosPlay raw OPL format.

Don't know if the email is outdated. But the RDosPlay stuff was added February 2005.

You could also try postmaster@zdoom.org or rheit@zdoom.org

I've got an email from the author of a AdLib archive. We are not the only ones looking for this RDOS guy:

Hello, Vidar.

> Do you know where I can find the RDOS Play author?

No, sadly, I do not. I have attempted to contact him both by e-mail and by ICQ and both methods have failed.

> We need the unhsq source and some player code for a remake project over at www.dune2k.com

I wanted the RAC.EXE (RDOS Music Saver) source code, myself, so that it could be modified to work with games that use the DOS4GW (and compatible) 32-bit extenders. Sadly, it seems this won't happen.

Have a nice day.

Monsieur OUXX

Monsieur OUXX

Posted
  • Author
Posted

Tried this email adress? The ZDOOM Main programmer email found in a ZDOOM source file:

Randy Heit

Don't write to him, I already did it, but he had no contact with Roman and doesn't know where to find him.

Monsieur OUXX

Monsieur OUXX

Posted
  • Author
Posted

GODDAM! There is also a telephone number!

Argh, this guy is gonna make me crazy !

I begin to wonder if he really exists, just like the "George Kaplan" character in Hitchcock's "North by Northwest".

I phoned at that number, but I only got an automatic answer by a machine speaking in Cezc.

The worst thing is that it seemed to indicate a new phone number where to call... But i couldn't understand it.

vidiware

vidiware

Posted
Posted

Roman is probably the most wanted computer programmer at the moment :)

How did you find the picture?!?

sesam.no didn't give me any new results.

google.no are already scanned.

So far we can say that this guy is involved in emulation, rdos and linux. :P

some unique results with altavista.com:

dolejsi@yahoo.com <-- tried this email adress?

dolejsi@gmail.com <-- or this? gmail should probably work as they are quite new.

Both adresses are found in guestbooks. Try them you M.OUXX

Sad news @ http://members.iinet.net.au/~vannevar/tyrian/music.html:

You can also use the old RDosPlay program to listen to the LDS files. It was written by Roman Dolejsi who was located and contacted by Borg Number One. Roman had lost the sources to RDosPlay but he told Borg Number One that Andras Molnar (the original author of the Loudness Sound System) lived in Germany so Borg spent almost three years searching for him. Andras was able to supply his source code which Borg Number One passed on to Simon Peter who used them to add LDS support to AdPlug.

But he might still have documentation/ushsq. At least we need to find this mysterious man. Has anybody talked to the "Borg Number One" guy?

Monsieur OUXX

Monsieur OUXX

Posted
  • Author
Posted

I tried these ones :  ;D

rdolejsi@yahoo.com,

dolejsi@yahoo.com,

rdos@yahoo.com,

dolejsi@gmail.com,

rdolejsi@gmail.com,

rdos@gmail.com,

rdos@hotmail.com,

rdolejsi@hotmail.com,

dolejsi@hotmail.com,

roman.dolejsi@yahoo.com,

roman.dolejsi@hotmail.com,

roman.dolejsi@gmail.com

Join the conversation

You can post now and register later. If you have an account, sign in now to post with your account.
Note: Your post will require moderator approval before it will be visible.

Guest
Reply to this topic...

×   Pasted as rich text.   Paste as plain text instead

  Only 75 emoji are allowed.

×   Your link has been automatically embedded.   Display as a link instead

×   Your previous content has been restored.   Clear editor

×   You cannot paste images directly. Upload or insert images from URL.

×
 Share
Go to topic listing
×
×
  • Create New...

Important Information

We have placed cookies on your device to help make this website better. You can adjust your cookie settings, otherwise we'll assume you're okay to continue.