Some stray thoughts about Worms: The Director's Cut, WinUAE, and CD audio

[squirminator2k]

Worms: The Director's Cut was released in the Spring of 1997, but if you bought the February '97 issue of CU Amiga (CD-ROM edition), you would have been treated to a ton of extra content for the game - not just extra maps and mountains, but the FMV sequences from the other console versions of Worms as well as CD audio tracks. The intent was for CUCD7 to serve as a sort-of expansion for WormsDC that offered enhancements if you happened to have a CD-ROM drive hooked up to your machine.

Unfortunately, support for CUCD7 was not included in the final game due to time constraints, and a promised patch to add support never materialized (only one official patch, v1.07, was ever released, and while it did fix a lot of critical bugs in the game, it sadly did not include CD-ROM support).

Flash forward to today. I mostly play WormsDC in WinUAE these days, and if I'm streaming the game on Twitch I typically have VLC playing looping playlist of music from either Worms: Reinforcements of Worms 2 playing in the background.

But my brain keeps coming back to this idea: What if there was a way to hook VLC into WinUAE and play the appropriate music at the appropriate time? Like a little app or plugin that lets you select specific audio files for certain terrain types and plays them on a loop until a different map is loaded. Or detects when you're in the menus and plays the menu music.

Now, this idea is beyond me. I'm not a programmer. In fact, I'd go so far as to say I am, in fact, a Dunce™. I'm not even that good at Worms. Not to mention the fact that, unless a Classic Worms community springs up overnight, I'd probably be the only bugger who'd use such a tool.

But it has to be technically feasible, right? Is this just some rubbish nonsense idea my brain spat out at me in the same dreams where Jeff Foxworthy told me "fear of failure is just desire to succeed in the wrong direction"? Or is this something a person with the relevant knowledge could actually pull off?

[Matt_H]

I guess the theory behind it would be some sort of memory monitor in WinUAE to detect the various game states coupled with an interface to VLC to play the appropriate tracks. But I don't know if the appropriate inter-process communication exists for either WinUAE or VLC, nor whether memory states in WinUAE can trigger events.

I imagine it would be easier to fully patch using only the Amiga side, i.e., hack in the original CD32 version's CD audio code. Or pester Andy to finish the new version of the patch.

Either way, you're looking for the services of a top-tier Amiga pro.

[squirminator2k]

Originally Posted by Matt_H

I guess the theory behind it would be some sort of memory monitor in WinUAE to detect the various game states coupled with an interface to VLC to play the appropriate tracks. But I don't know if the appropriate inter-process communication exists for either WinUAE or VLC, nor whether memory states in WinUAE can trigger events.

I imagine it would be easier to fully patch using only the Amiga side, i.e., hack in the original CD32 version's CD audio code. Or pester Andy to finish the new version of the patch.

Either way, you're looking for the services of a top-tier Amiga pro.

Oh, this is all speculative at this point. It'd be Nice, certainly, but I don't imagine anything will come of this daft, half-cooked-while-I-was-on-the-toilet notion.

Of note: The CD32 code is actually in the Amiga version of the original Worms (IIRC the Amiga version will boot as the CD32 version if it detects the relevant library, and WormShell allows you to toggle this option on and off if'n you like), but is likely not present in Worms: The Director's Cut. Which, y'know, pity, but hey.

[AmigaHope]

What format is the FMV in? Would probably be better to patch the game to call a CDXL playback routine on the Amiga instead of trying to make some weird hook into UAE