Differences between releases and ports of C&C

[Nyerguds 100]

Thanks! That's from the actual game then, right?

 

[edit]

 

It seems mac C&C's versions of the "zoom to Africa/europe" animations are different files... they're slightly smaller in filesize than the PC version.

 

Now here's the interesting part. From what I can see, it uses Dune II's colour adding technique to be overlayed on the last image that was shown on the screen.

 

I attached the last frame of the Africa animation. As you see, the only correctly drawn pieces are the compensation for the old globe, and the Africa parts around the globe. It seems that to produce black over the past image, the exact image of the old globe has to be added to it. Seeing as this is shown in XCC, without that compensation, it makes the globe image visible in the parts around the Africa image.

 

There seems to be something fundamentally different about the format though. XCC crashes on them sometimes, and as you can see from the converted image, there's some corruption at the top of the image that's unrelated to the colour adding system. I tried the old DOS mix manager, but that made an even greater mess of the colours.

[Psylus 0]

Yeah, it's right from an install of the game. Any ideas why the format would be slightly different? My guess would be a possible difference in implementation between C&C95 and C&C Mac and how they had to load data from external files.

 

I'm guessing there will be few answers unless someone cracks open C&C Mac with a disassembler and works through the PowerPC ASM...

[Nyerguds 100]

Honestly, I have no idea... not even sure if this colour overlay system works without keeping the same colour palette, and I'm pretty sure they're different in C&C95. This colour adding thing is an older technique I've only seen in the longer animation sequences of the games before Westwood developed the VQA video format.

 

I'll have to go and compare the colour palettes of these files when I got some more time; might shed some light on that.