View Single Post
  #5  
Old October 7th, 2011, 01:02 PM
lch's Avatar

lch lch is offline
General
 
Join Date: Feb 2007
Location: R'lyeh
Posts: 3,861
Thanks: 144
Thanked 403 Times in 176 Posts
lch is on a distinguished road
Default Re: Modifying the TRS files possible?

Yes, this "Spooky Sprites" program is indeed what produces the TRS files and it is something that JK has programmed over a dozen years ago on an Atari Falcon ST when he was still in college. When I tried to find out how to do sprite dumps, I tried to get every version that has been released of said program; and I did manage to still find archives that contained version 2, 4, 5 and 6 of the Atari Falcon program on old BBS and Usenet archives, together with nice documentation about the file format. I went as far as getting the programs to run on an emulator, but they were of no use as they crashed on everything from the games that I tried to load, with the exception of the original CoE game files, maybe.

Although many of the original Atari Falcon ST hardware restrictions are still in use in the current sprite format(!) which leads to funny code you have to create in order to make those sprites usable, JK has ported the program to Linux, which is what KO is using now, commenting that it'd be the "least user-friendly graphics program one can possibly imagine" and of course the file format has since had a few additions to it as well. Which is why I couldn't get a "perfect" sprite extraction (Ulm's national flag still looks strange when I extract it), but something which works well enough to be of some use. The code that I came up with was a little messy and didn't receive any cleanup when I sent it to llamabeast, I'll pass it to you via mail as well now if you want to play with it.

Here's a screenshot that KO supplied from the Linux version:


And here are a few very old threads that were concerned with the original software, which might interest you to read them:
- Updated graphics?
- I can't extract the sprites from the .exe
- Question about Dom 3 development
__________________
Come to the Dom3 Wiki and help us to build the biggest Dominions-centered knowledge base on the net.
Visit my personal user page there, too!
Pretender file password recovery
Emergency comic relief
Reply With Quote
The Following User Says Thank You to lch For This Useful Post: