Force Engine - Mac data

Mac rendered at 640x480 apposed to Dos at 320xsomething

Maybe not 480, probably 400? Menu says 640x400...640x395 measured?

600x400 doubled pixels, so 300x200?

Anyway, 384x200 is "teensy":

Most parts are the same, but

• the loading screen was 640x480
• hud textures were double resolution 
• weapons data stored in WEAPONS.GOB, but otherwise the same content
• minor differences in levels
  
• fonts smoother(extra Glowing!.fnt ?)
  
• music same/different. music is stored in resource fork?
• cutscenes: same except for AGENTMNU.LFD and MENU.LFD (font was upscaled, the button names were changed from "DOS" to "QUIT", and a mysterious widening of two parallel red lines.
  

 

The big changes below are not changes, just re-ordered arm1 <-> arm2 messages

Hotkeys, quit hotkey changed to qQ from dD

NARSHADA.O is missing an object(missing the remote sprite), and extra LOGIC: ANIM in nava card:

SECBASE.O only has an extra LOGIC: ANIM similar to the one in NARSHADA

TEXT.MSG is mac-ified:

The midi instruments are stored in instruments1,2, all in the resource fork(I think that is all that and menu/icon things are all the resource fork data):

instruments in 2 are roughly double the size of 1 so probably 16bit?

Stereo Panning? ... listens. It seems to work. dos version doesn't have an option for it, but it seems to work by default.

I don't know if there is a way to send the midi data out of the mac version, or if the instruments provided are all we get.

cutscenes (extracted with DF2.exe in dosbox, probably could have used lfdtool.py in win):

 

python ..\..\..\..\..\dftools-master\delttool.py AGENTDLG_11.DELT ..\AGENTMNU.PLT

MAC 324x182

Dos 323x188

I think I need some more context.

All the other AGENTDLG_##.DELT are just various menu ui bits, "are you sure you want to quit", "yes", "no" buttons and such.

AGENTMENU.ANIM
D:\Games\TheForceEngine-v1.09.530\ModPrep\Dark Forces Data\Cutscenes\AGENTMNU>python ..\..\..\..\dftools-master\animtool.py extract AGENTMNU.ANM AGENTMNU
Extracting "D:\Games\TheForceEngine-v1.09.530\ModPrep\Dark Forces Data\Cutscenes\AGENTMNU\AGENTMNU.ANM" into directory "D:\Games\TheForceEngine-v1.09.530\ModPrep\Dark Forces Data\Cutscenes\AGENTMNU\AGENTMNU"

Macified text.

D:\Games\TheForceEngine-v1.09.530\ModPrep\Dark Forces Data-dos\LFD\MENU>python ..\..\..\..\dftools-master\fnttool.py FONT8.FON
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "D:\Games\TheForceEngine-v1.09.530\dftools-master\fnttool.py", line 4, in <module>
    from PIL import Image
ModuleNotFoundError: No module named 'PIL'

D:\Games\TheForceEngine-v1.09.530\ModPrep\Dark Forces Data-dos\LFD\MENU>pip install Pillow
Collecting Pillow
  Downloading Pillow-10.0.1-cp39-cp39-win_amd64.whl (2.5 MB)
     |████████████████████████████████| 2.5 MB 3.2 MB/s
Installing collected packages: Pillow
Successfully installed Pillow-10.0.1
WARNING: You are using pip version 21.0; however, version 23.2.1 is available.
You should consider upgrading via the 'c:\python39\python.exe -m pip install --upgrade pip' command.

D:\Games\TheForceEngine-v1.09.530\ModPrep\Dark Forces Data-dos\LFD\MENU>python ..\..\..\..\dftools-master\fnttool.py FONT8.FON
Loaded built-in palette "SECBASE"
Converting "D:\Games\TheForceEngine-v1.09.530\ModPrep\Dark Forces Data-dos\LFD\MENU\FONT8.FON"
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "D:\Games\TheForceEngine-v1.09.530\dftools-master\fnttool.py", line 44, in <module>
    main()
  File "D:\Games\TheForceEngine-v1.09.530\dftools-master\fnttool.py", line 40, in main
    from_fnt(args)
  File "D:\Games\TheForceEngine-v1.09.530\dftools-master\fnttool.py", line 23, in from_fnt
    fnt.to_image(fnt.read(image), rgb_palette).save(f'{imageName}.png')
  File "D:\Games\TheForceEngine-v1.09.530\dftools-master\formats\fnt.py", line 23, in read
    raise Exception('File does not have FNT magic identifier.')
Exception: File does not have FNT magic identifier.

oh it isn't a 'fnt' it is a 'font'

＼（〇_ｏ）／

Gimp to the rescue

Mac - Dos

The mission briefing uses a different font:

Jan looks a bit smoother

Yep, some of those pixels have been al/tered.

I cant find the upscaled jan and mon mothma images. TFE looks like it is

s_menuActor = lactorAnim_load(bgAnim, &bounds, 0, 0, 0);

which does a:

sprintf(animName, "%s.ANIM", name);

name -> bgAnim ->  brief -> bgAnim -> &s_sharedState.briefingList.briefing[briefingIndex];

list gets loaded in with:
if (!parseBriefingList(&s_sharedState.briefingList, "briefing.lst"))

which is in DARK.GOB. I probably should have guess that,

LEV: SECBASE    LFD: dfbrief.lfd ANI: brf-mon PAL: brf-jan
DFBRIEF.LFD ... meld showed them as identical, but I'll check 'brf-mon' or 'brf-jan' or 'brf-nil'
brf-jan.anim -> brf-jan_0.DELT has the background, but it is the same as the dos version 311x200.

 

I'm still not sure where the extra pixels come from.