Meet The Man Beyond The Mask (October 19, 2005)

[ChrisReid]

Joe from the Origin Museum recently came across some photos of John Schuck and wanted to share them with everyone. Wing Commander fans can spot many familiar actors and actresses in a variety of movies and television shows, but Mr. Schuck isn't quite as recognizable. He played the voice of Hobbes in Wing Commander 3. Almost every visitor to this site can quickly imagine his growling raspy voice, but relatively few can picture how he looks. If you need a Hobbes refresher, AD has extracted an 11 meg divx sample clip from Wing Commander 3 for the Playstation.

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In addition to his role in WC3, he's had a recurring part in two Star Trek movies, several Trek series, Babylon 5 and many other series.

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Original update published on October 19, 2005

 

[BrynS]

Looking through his IMDB credits, I'm a bit surprised that he didn't appear in more Star Trek episodes than he did, as the producers tend to re-hire character actors that they like quite often for different and/or previous roles, notwithstanding his recent appearance in the Klingon 2-parter in the fourth season of Enterprise.

His voice must be fairly dextrous as the Wing Commander 3 behind the scenes footage shows Rhys Davies, Tim Curry and Alan Mandell recording their Kilrathi voices without any electronic manipulation.

@AD:
I would interested to know how you extracted the Hobbes sample clip from WC3 for the Playstation? Would I be correct in assuming that due to the Fraps watermark in the sample that you were playing WC3 on the PC via an emulator and used Fraps to capture the footage? Or are using a different utility or procedure?

I bought a copy of the Playstation version of WC3 off E-Bay recently with the intention of capturing some FMV, as I believe that the Playstation version has higher quality FMV, which your sample also suggests. I don't have a PS1/2 console, so I searched around for various PC emulators and utilities to playback typical playstation video files, but was unsuccessful. The other option I could try is to buy a PS1/2 console and output the PSX a/v directly into my capture rig, but if it's possible to rip the FMV sequences directly, that would be more preferable.

I'm currently bidding on the 3DO version of WC3, which is also supposed to have a less rigorous transcoding of the original FMV footage, but trying to rip the FMV without capturing it directly from the consoles a/v output could be dificult as there seem to be even less emulators and utilities available for the 3DO.

Cheers,


BrynS

 

[AD]

Hey BrynS...

Your right. I used a playstation emulator (epsxe) running with "petes opengl driver ver 2.6". (you also need a file that technically only legal to have if you own a playstation, which I do) When you download the emulator you need to also download a graphics driver plugin for it (the install walks you through it to some extent) an I found I needed to experiment with them to be able to find one that worked smoothly and which settings to us. This particular driver worked nicely for me. In fact, other than the low res HUD, because you can set it to ue your 3D card i would say the ships in flight looked better than on the PC version.

The trickest part were the controls though. you can map the PSX controls to whatever you want, but I found it easiest just to use it with a PSX style usb gamepad with the dpad mapped to the left stick.


Now about the video... there is a degree off blockiness toits nature but over all I believe the wc3 PSX video to be of superior quality to the PC version. More detail is apparent and it's certainly cleaner (as it doesnt have the "sticky" pixels from the PC version. You can even see individual hull plates on the cap ships (confed and kilrathi) that I don't rememder seeing previously.

I managed to extract pretty much everything but the raw videos from the PSX version. If someone has a solution I'd be very grateful. I think I tried just about every possible utility for playing video and PSX files there is in existence. Some How I feel they're using some odd kind of either compression or encription that was specefic to WC3,4 for the PSX. I don't know. Anyway the result was me simply recording a sample of it running with epsxe using fraps. And seeing how you noticed, my intention of making others aware of why I want to extract the PSX video was a success.

 

[BrynS]

Thanks for the info AD!

I'll give epsxe a try. Hopefully there is some method or utility available to extract the raw WC3 PSX video files or at least it's a possibility that may emerge in the future via an astute programmer.

Cheers,


BrynS