Zool

Hi - I obviously suck at this ripping lark as I've been trying to get the sprites out of Zool all afternoon and have made frustratingly little progress.

Although Zool and Zool 2 get mentioned a few times on these forums I can’t see the finished article anywhere – please correct me if I’ve missed it.

Anyone care to take pity on me and help – uss file attached?

If it makes any difference then I actually have permission from the copyright holder to do this and you genuinely would be contributing to saving something for posterity.

Cheers,

Jake

[gifgit]

Right here goes , The tiles are in st mode 16 x 16 with 4 bitplanes , the enemy sprites are in am mode and all different heights so loads of individual rips unfortunately , and the main sprite is in sp mode and different heights so he would have to be ripped frame by frame.
attached tiles

[Galahad/FLT]

Originally Posted by gremlin

Hi - I obviously suck at this ripping lark as I've been trying to get the sprites out of Zool all afternoon and have made frustratingly little progress.

Although Zool and Zool 2 get mentioned a few times on these forums I can’t see the finished article anywhere – please correct me if I’ve missed it.

Anyone care to take pity on me and help – uss file attached?

If it makes any difference then I actually have permission from the copyright holder to do this and you genuinely would be contributing to saving something for posterity.

Cheers,

Jake

If you have permission from the copyright holder, then surely you can get the graphics directly from them?

I happen to know that Gremlin (now Funcom I think) have/had a room that stored nothing but source code and graphics and music for every single game they did.

@gifgit - many thanks for those. I spent ages going through in 4-bit with a width of 16, but couldn't see those. I must be doing something wrong. I can see 'shadows' of the Zool images, but was never able to get them to converge properly.

@galahad - if only things were that organised! I worked at Gremlin for around 7 years, yet I don't know who would have such an archive. Gremlin was taken over by Infogrames and then Infogrames eventually shut down nearly all of their European development. I was there when the Gremlin studio was cleared out and a huge amount of stuff went straight in the skip!

Jake

[Galahad/FLT]

Originally Posted by gremlin

@gifgit - many thanks for those. I spent ages going through in 4-bit with a width of 16, but couldn't see those. I must be doing something wrong. I can see 'shadows' of the Zool images, but was never able to get them to converge properly.

@galahad - if only things were that organised! I worked at Gremlin for around 7 years, yet I don't know who would have such an archive. Gremlin was taken over by Infogrames and then Infogrames eventually shut down nearly all of their European development. I was there when the Gremlin studio was cleared out and a huge amount of stuff went straight in the skip!

Jake

Thats such a shame, they had a nice Amiga A3000 there connected to their internal network..... bugger

I worked there for 3 months and the room was on the second floor, shelves and shelves of every development for every title they did. Such a waste if they chucked it all away.

Blimey - that must have been at Carver Street for them to have had Amigas connected to the network. I doubt that survived the move to Bowden Street at the end of the 90's.

[Galahad/FLT]

Originally Posted by gremlin

Blimey - that must have been at Carver Street for them to have had Amigas connected to the network. I doubt that survived the move to Bowden Street at the end of the 90's.

Yeah it was Carver Street. The guy who ran the network and security for it all kept the A3000 hooked up, he loved it.

I was able to buy two A4000 -020/030 developer machines for peanuts before I left.

They had B2000's under some desks collecting dust

Most of the Gremlin staff were then fully into Saturn and PS stuff and couldn't give a fuck about Amiga anymore, this was the time of Actua Soccer and Slipstream 5000, so going back a few years.

[gifgit]

@ Gremlin

Managed to find this old rip on disk , ripped this years ago , hope it`s ok

Looks great - thanks very much indeed!

I don't suppose you did the level enemies too? :-)

[gifgit]

here ya go , got some enemies done but not sure how many more there are atm

That's just great thank you once again gifgit...!

Hi - just thought you might appreciate this:

[ Show youtube player ]

This is the final remake of Zool for the book running under Game Maker 8. I actually was given the graphics from the Mega Drive version in the end by one of the original programmers who had kept a backup. They were slightly higher resolution than the Amiga versions so they worked better on the PC.

Thanks to this forum for all their help anyway.

See this post on another forum for more updates about the book:
http://gmc.yoyogames.com/index.php?showtopic=477731

Regards,

Jake

[zenox98]

Nice work, Jake. I wouldn't have thought Game Maker could handle Zool, but it looks great.

[seuden]

Looks awesome, good work.

Cheers. I will make the executable available when the book is released in a coouple of months time and post a link here if anyone is interested...
Regards,
Jake

[aybe]

Hi all !

Here we go the first 4 level maps and tiles :

















Notes :
- I've decided to use the original background instead of magenta
- All tiles are identical except for level 4 which background is slightly darker
- Size are corrects even though not entirely filled (esp. level 4)
- Level 2 big hole on the top is on bottom in-game but it's how it's represented in memory

Other levels will follow soon ...

Thanks to Codetapper and his great MapTapper program

If you need to grab their palettes use my program Png8PaletteExtractor .

Enjoy !