Leander - Another Try 4 a complete Rip

[hajodick]

Back in the Days my brother and I tried to rip Leander completely. The Method was very different from the techniques used today. But that was the fun of it.

Yesterday I started again after more than 25 years with the Loading and Intro Sequence. I'm going to do this the very old-fashioned way with one difference. I use memory dumps from WinUAE where possible and suitable.

On the other hand I read the asm code of the game to find all the files the game is loading and write them separately to disk. They have to be decrunched, so the decruncher has to be found and reassembled. I will try to bring all single files online over my own site when this is done.

All graphics will then be ripped manually with asm code and all palettes have to be searched by hand. That was the fun back in the days. I want to do that again.

If you are interested I will add some info about the ripping besides the images. I'm working on an amiga asm coding site which will have a game graphics section too. There you will then be able to find the original IFF Files that I create.

Let's start with the "Extra Memory Found and Used" Animation from the very beginning.

[hajodick]

Here are the Intro Pictures that - besides the Leander Logo - are missing in most cracks because of missing disk space. They were taken from the Memory Dumps and saved as RAW/IFF Files - These are not screenshots.

[hajodick]

And here are the graphics for the animated intro sequence. So now I can start with World 1.1.

yes.. great work the brothers..

[zenox98]

I am incredibly interested in this as I have been after the resources - and the asm - for a long while, as it is one of my favourite games.

Unfortunately, even after many hours pouring over the code via Resource, I failed to get anywhere due to my lack of knowledge.

I'll be following your progress avidly.

All the best.

[musashi9]

I started a remake of this game in flash a good few years ago. I managed to recreate the first 4 levels (including the dragon, which I was very proud of :P ). I may look into redoing it in html5 one day. I dug around the code a lot while doing my remake , let me know if you need any help, if I can remember when I did :P

[zenox98]

Originally Posted by musashi9

I started a remake of this game in flash a good few years ago. I managed to recreate the first 4 levels (including the dragon, which I was very proud of :P ). I may look into redoing it in html5 one day. I dug around the code a lot while doing my remake , let me know if you need any help, if I can remember when I did :P

How strange - creating an HTML version is what I've started also. I'm using a piece of software called 'Construct 2' which makes doing a remake quite easy, if you have all the resources

Here's a gifcam of where I am:https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/...93/Leander.gif

[musashi9]

Ah well that saves me the bother of redoing mine
Your one looks good.
Flash version for anyone who is interested
http://www.flashtro.com/index.php?e=page&c=Amiga&id=737
(level 1) click mouse to bypass the cracktro to get to the game. Then use arrow keys to move and CTRL or 0 (numpad) to fire

[hajodick]

After a long pause I restarted the work on Leander to add the results to my soon upcoming Amiga Website where the final results will be presented.

I lately worked on the files from Leander as they can be found in the latest WHDLoad archives.



This table is far from being complete. Most of the files are packed. After detecting the unpacker all files are now unpacked. All basic images are extracted as IFF.

The big problem is to locate the tiles for the levels. They don't exist in a raw format as I can tell, but it is very likely that they are compressed in a simple way to save memory. Does anyone know more about that and can help?

More infos will follow soon...

[CodyJarrett]

You can rip the tileset using Maptapper.

The bitplane width is 4096 and the height 16 pixels although the tiles themselves are 16x16.

[hajodick]

Originally Posted by CodyJarrett

You can rip the tileset using Maptapper. The bitplane width is 4096 and the height 16 pixels although the tiles themselves are 16x16.

Thank you very much. I found it out before I've read your answer. I got the width with Maptapper and then converted the tiles with a little asm routine. This seems important for the other tiles from the forthcoming levels - I don't want to play each level to get a savestate. So now that the rule is clear, I have to get the color tables for all tile sets and then find out which tile set belongs to which level. Then I will calc the gamemaps from scratch with another code. I love to still rip by hand .

Below you find my result.

[CodyJarrett]

The HOL level maps might help: https://hol.abime.net/850/gamemap

[DisasterIncarna]

if desperate you could contact the guy who made it? who knows maybe hes still got all the files ?

his yt channel is here : https://www.youtube.com/c/CodingSecrets

[hajodick]

Here are the 15 Tilesets. I'm a little bit proud as it seems that these tilesets can nowhere be found and even my brother - The Ripper from God - never did them. But don't take me to serious here...

Some of them seem to be used with a different colormap as viewable on HOL.



The colors may slightly differ from the HOL colors because of a simple reason:

The Amiga uses 12-Bit RGB Colors with 3 times 4 Bits for each component of the color. DPaint stores then in 3 Bytes = 24-Bit RGB.
Take a look at an OCS/ECS-IFF Image in the CMAP chunk. The value $A74 is there stored as $A0,$70,$40.
The correct 24-bit-value is therefore $AA7744.
When checking the HOL-values you may find e.g. $AC7542 for a pixel. The difference is sometimes visible when taking a clear look at the pixels.

I personally prefer the exact Amiga-RGB-Values.

2021-12-13: Edit: There is a 16th tile set named SPIDER witch is still missing - It will follow soon.

[hajodick]

Originally Posted by CodyJarrett

The HOL level maps might help: https://hol.abime.net/850/gamemap

Thanxx. I got them before and used them to find / arrange the palettes.

[rothers]

I think if you just emailed Jon he might send you the disk in a more friendly format. He seems to answer emails and be happy to help out with his old stuff where he legally can.

[Cherno]

Great work on the tile rips. I'll have to play this game again, the graphics are so nice to look at.

[hajodick]

Here is the gamemap for the starting level completely calculated with an asm routine from the original tiles and map data.
No HOL watermark and rendered as IFF in the original 3 bitplane format. The resulting PNG as attached below is stored in 4-bit-PNG, so the file is much shorter than the HOL version.