AllTinker
1st Lieutenant
Hey all, long-time lurker here, lurking no longer.
I was going to make a post in the fan projects section; wrote a big ol' post then realised I couldn't link to anything until I had 10 posts. So I guess it's introduction time instead!
The original Wing Commander was definitely a formative game for me. WC1 and Privateer 2 probably share top spot in terms of number of hours I've sunk into them over the years, but I like the entire WC and Privateer series. No huge surprises there, I'm sure.
It isn't what I was going to post about today, but I've been chipping away at a long-term Wing Commander hobby project for quite a while now, which has me researching all sorts of things.
Today I was digging into the FM Towns versions - wrote a little tool which converts the digital sound effects to WAVs. I'm not sure if that's old news - but I certainly couldn't find much on the topic, let alone extracted files.
Turns out I can attach images at least, so here's a gem I found in the game data:
Turns out a good number of the sound effect files are silly nonsense too - got some good chuckles. Again, not sure if this is all old news or not!
For the sake of extra potential discussion, amongst other things I'm looking into the special MIDI system messages in the (DOS) Wing Commander MIDI data (e.g. 0x5, 0x9, 0xD, 0xE). They seem completely non-standard - they trip up every player I've tried, even extremely full-featured/robust ones. Has anyone made any progress on figuring out their formats? I can guess at their purposes but the actual byte sizes/patterns are a mystery to me right now. I'm also sticking to clean-room reverse engineering so I can't dig into the disassembly for clues... I think the next step is to compare the file data to actual playback, see which bytes the engine is handling rather than passing through... Anywho!
I was going to make a post in the fan projects section; wrote a big ol' post then realised I couldn't link to anything until I had 10 posts. So I guess it's introduction time instead!
The original Wing Commander was definitely a formative game for me. WC1 and Privateer 2 probably share top spot in terms of number of hours I've sunk into them over the years, but I like the entire WC and Privateer series. No huge surprises there, I'm sure.
It isn't what I was going to post about today, but I've been chipping away at a long-term Wing Commander hobby project for quite a while now, which has me researching all sorts of things.
Today I was digging into the FM Towns versions - wrote a little tool which converts the digital sound effects to WAVs. I'm not sure if that's old news - but I certainly couldn't find much on the topic, let alone extracted files.
Turns out I can attach images at least, so here's a gem I found in the game data:
Turns out a good number of the sound effect files are silly nonsense too - got some good chuckles. Again, not sure if this is all old news or not!
For the sake of extra potential discussion, amongst other things I'm looking into the special MIDI system messages in the (DOS) Wing Commander MIDI data (e.g. 0x5, 0x9, 0xD, 0xE). They seem completely non-standard - they trip up every player I've tried, even extremely full-featured/robust ones. Has anyone made any progress on figuring out their formats? I can guess at their purposes but the actual byte sizes/patterns are a mystery to me right now. I'm also sticking to clean-room reverse engineering so I can't dig into the disassembly for clues... I think the next step is to compare the file data to actual playback, see which bytes the engine is handling rather than passing through... Anywho!
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