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• Subtitling Sierra RBT Files

  2 juin 2016, par Multimedia Mike — Game Hacking

  This is part 2 of the adventure started in my Subtitling Sierra VMD Files post. After I completed the VMD subtitling, The Translator discovered a wealth of animation files in a format called RBT (this apparently stands for “Robot” but I think “Ribbit” format could be more fun). What are we going to do ? We had come so far by solving the VMD subtitling problem for Phantasmagoria. It would be a shame if the effort ground to a halt due to this.

  Fortunately, the folks behind the ScummVM project already figured out enough of the format to be able to decode the RBT files in Phantasmagoria.

  In the end, I was successful in creating a completely standalone tool that can take a Robot file and a subtitle file and create a new Robot file with subtitles. The source code is here (subtitle-rbt.c). Here’s what the final result looks like :

  
  
  “What’s in the refrigerator ?” I should note at this juncture that I am not sure if this particular Robot file even has sound or dialogue since I was conducting these experiments on a computer with non-working audio.
  

  The RBT Format
  I have created a new MultimediaWiki page describing the Robot Animation format based on the ScummVM source code. I have not worked with a format quite like this before. These are paletted animations which consist of a sequence of independent frames that are designed to be overlaid on top of static background. Because of these characteristics, each frame encodes its own unique dimensions and origin coordinate within the frame. While the Phantasmagoria VMD files are usually 288×144 (which are usually double-sized for the benefit of a 640×400 Super VGA canvas), these frames are meant to be plotted on a game field that was roughly 576×288 (288×144 doublesized).
  

  For example, 2 minimalist animation frames from a desk investigation Robot file :

  
  
  100×147

  
  101×149
  

  As for compression, my first impression was that the algorithm was the same as VMD. This is wrong. It evidently uses an unmodified version of a standard algorithm called Lempel-Ziv-Stac (LZS). It shows up in several RFCs and was apparently used in MS-DOS’s transparent disk compression scheme.

  Approach
  Thankfully, many of the lessons I learned from the previous project are applicable to this project, including : subtitle library interfacing, subtitling in the paletted colorspace, and replacing encoded frames from the original file instead of trying to create a new file.

  Here is the pitch for this project :

  • Create a C program that can traverse through an input file, piece by piece, and generate an output file. The result of this should be a bitwise identical file.
  • Adapt the LZS compression decoding algorithm from ScummVM into the new tool. Make the tool dump raw Portable NetMap (PNM) files of varying dimensions and ensure that they look correct.
  • Compress using LZS.
  • Stretch the frames and draw subtitles.
  • More compression. Find the minimum window for each frame.

  Compression
  Normally, my first goal is to decompress the video and store the data in a raw form. However, this turned out to be mathematically intractable. While the format does support both compressed and uncompressed frames (even though ScummVM indicates that the uncompressed path is yet unexercised), the goal of this project requires making the frames so large that they overflow certain parameters of the file.

  A Robot file has a sequence of frames and 2 tables describing the size of each frame. One table describes the entire frame size (audio + video) while the second table describes just the video frame size. Since these tables only use 16 bits to specify a size, the maximum frame size is 65536 bytes. Leaving space for the audio portion of the frame, this only leaves a per-frame byte budget of about 63000 bytes for the video. Expanding the frame to 576×288 (165,888 pixels) would overflow this limit.

  Anyway, the upshot is that I needed to compress the data up front.

  Fortunately, the LZS compressor is pretty straightforward, at least if you have experience writing VLC-oriented codecs. While the algorithm revolves around back references, my approach was to essentially write an RLE encoder. My compressor would search for runs of data (plentiful when I started to stretch the frame for subtitling purposes). When a run length of n=3 or more of the same pixel is found, encode the pixel by itself, and then store a back reference of offset -1 and length (n-1). It took a little while to iron out a few problems, but I eventually got it to work perfectly.

  I have to say, however, that the format is a little bit weird in how it codes very large numbers. The length encoding is somewhat Golomb-like, i.e., smaller values are encoded with fewer bits. However, when it gets to large numbers, it starts encoding counts of 15 as blocks of 1111. For example, 24 is bigger than 7. Thus, emit 1111 into the bitstream and subtract 8 from 23 -> 16. Still bigger than 15, so stuff another 1111 into the bitstream and subtract 15. Now we’re at 1, so stuff 0001. So 24 is 11111111 0001. 12 bits is not too horrible. But the total number of bytes (value / 30). So a value of 300 takes around 10 bytes (80 bits) to encode.

  Palette Slices
  As in the VMD subtitling project, I took the subtitle color offered in the subtitle spec file as a suggestion and used Euclidean distance to match to the closest available color in the palette. One problem, however, is that the palette is a lot smaller in these animations. According to my notes, for the set of animations I scanned, only about 80 colors were specified, starting at palette index 55. I hypothesize that different slices of the palette are reserved for different uses. E.g., animation, background, and user interface. Thus, there is a smaller number of colors to draw upon for subtitling purposes.

  Scaling
  One bit of residual weirdness in this format is the presence of a per-frame scale factor. While most frames set this to 100 (100% scale), I have observed 70%, 80%, and 90%. ScummVM is a bit unsure about how to handle these, so I am as well. However, I eventually realized I didn’t really need to care, at least not when decoding and re-encoding the frame. Just preserve the scale factor. I intend to modify the tool further to take scale factor into account when creating the subtitle.

  The Final Resolution
  Right around the time that I was composing this post, The Translator emailed me and notified me that he had found a better way to subtitle the Robot files by modifying the scripts, rendering my entire approach moot. The result is much cleaner :

  
  
  Turns out that the engine supported subtitles all along
  

  It’s a good thing that I enjoyed the challenge or I might be annoyed at this point.

  See Also

  • Subtitling Sierra VMD Files : My effort to subtitle the main FMV files found in Sierra games.

• Subtitling Sierra VMD Files

  1er juin 2016, par Multimedia Mike — Game Hacking

  I was contacted by a game translation hobbyist from Spain (henceforth known as The Translator). He had set his sights on Sierra’s 7-CD Phantasmagoria. This mammoth game was driven by a lot of FMV files and animations that have speech. These require language translation in the form of video subtitling. He’s lucky that he found possibly the one person on the whole internet who has just the right combination of skill, time, and interest to pull this off. And why would I care about helping ? I guess I share a certain camaraderie with game hackers. Don’t act so surprised. You know what kind of stuff I like to work on.

  The FMV format used in this game is VMD, which makes an appearance in numerous Sierra titles. FFmpeg already supports decoding this format. FFmpeg also supports subtitling video. So, ideally, all that’s necessary to support this goal is to add a muxer for the VMD format which can encode raw video and audio, which the format supports. Implement video compression as extra credit.

  The pipeline that I envisioned looks like this :

  
  

  

  VMD Subtitling Process

  
  

  “Trivial !” I surmised. I just never learn, do I ?

  The Plan
  So here’s my initial pitch, outlining the work I estimated that I would need to do towards the stated goal :

  1. Create a new file muxer that produces a syntactically valid VMD file with bogus video and audio data. Make sure it works with both FFmpeg’s playback system as well as the proper Phantasmagoria engine.
  2. Create a new video encoder that essentially operates in pass-through mode while correctly building a palette.
  3. Create a new basic encoder for the video frames.

  A big unknown for me was exactly how subtitle handling operates in FFmpeg. Thanks to this project, I now know. I was concerned because I was pretty sure that font rendering entails anti-aliasing which bodes poorly for keeping the palette count under 256 unique colors.

  Computer Science Puzzle
  When pondering how to process the palette, I was excited for the opportunity to exercise actual computer science. FFmpeg converts frames from paletted frames to full RGB frames. Then it needs to convert them back to paletted frames. I had a vague recollection of solving this problem once before when I was experimenting with a new paletted video codec. I seem to recall that I did the palette conversion in a very naive manner. I just used a static 256-element array and processed each RGB pixel of the frame, seeing if the value already occurred in the table (O(n) lookup) and adding it otherwise.
  

  There are more efficient algorithms, however, such as hash tables and trees. Somewhere along the line, FFmpeg helpfully acquired a rarely-used tree data structure, which was perfect for this project.

  So I was pretty pleased with this optimization. Too bad this wouldn’t survive to the end of the effort.

  Another palette-related challenge was the fact that a group of pictures would be accumulating a new palette but that palette needed to be recorded before the group. Thus, the muxer needed to have extra logic to rewind the file when the video encoder transmitted a palette change.

  Video Compression
  VMD has a few methods in its compression toolbox. It can use interframe differencing, it has some RLE, or it can code a frame raw. It can also use a custom LZ-like format on top of these. For early prototypes, I elected to leave each frame coded raw. After the concept was proved, I implemented the frame differencing.

  
  

  

  
  Top frame compared with the middle frame yields the bottom frame : red pixels indicate changes
  

  Encoding only those red dots in between vast runs of unchanged pixels yielded a vast measurable improvement. The next step was to try wiring up FFmpeg’s existing LZ compression facilities to the encoder. This turned out to be implausible since VMD’s LZ variant has nothing to do with anything FFmpeg already provides. Fortunately, the LZ piece is not absolutely required and the frame differencing + RLE provides plenty of compression.

  Subtitling
  I’ve never done anything, multimedia programming-wise, concerning subtitles. I guess all the entertainment I care about has always been in my native tongue. What a good excuse to program outside of my comfort zone !

  First, I needed to know how to access FFmpeg’s subtitling facilities. Fortunately, The Translator did the legwork on this matter so I didn’t have to figure it out.

  However, I intuitively had misgivings about this phase. I had heard that the subtitling process performs anti-aliasing. That means that the image would need to be promoted to a higher colorspace for this phase and that the anti-aliasing process would likely push the color count way past 256. Some quick tests revealed this to be the case, as the running color count would leap by several hundred colors as soon as the palette accounting algorithm encountered a subtitle.

  So I dug into the subtitle subsystem. I discovered that the subtitle library operates by creating a linked list of subtitle bitmaps that the client app must render. The bitmaps are comprised of 8-bit alpha transparency values that must be composited onto the target frame (i.e., 0 = transparent, 255 = 100% opaque). For example, the letter ‘H’ :

                                    (with 00s removed)
  13 F8 41 00 00 00 00 68 E4  |  13 F8 41             68 E4    
  14 FF 44 00 00 00 00 6C EC  |  14 FF 44             6C EC
  14 FF 44 00 00 00 00 6C EC  |  14 FF 44             6C EC
  14 FF 44 00 00 00 00 6C EC  |  14 FF 44             6C EC
  14 FF DC D0 D0 D0 D0 E4 EC  |  14 FF DC D0 D0 D0 D0 E4 EC
  14 FF 7E 50 50 50 50 9A EC  |  14 FF 7E 50 50 50 50 9A EC
  14 FF 44 00 00 00 00 6C EC  |  14 FF 44             6C EC
  14 FF 44 00 00 00 00 6C EC  |  14 FF 44             6C EC
  14 FF 44 00 00 00 00 6C EC  |  14 FF 44             6C EC
  11 E0 3B 00 00 00 00 5E CE  |  11 E0 3B             5E CE
  

  To get around the color explosion problem, I chose a threshold value and quantized values above and below to 255 and 0, respectively. Further, the process chooses an appropriate color from the existing palette rather than introducing any new colors.

  Muxing Matters
  In order to force VMD into a general purpose media framework, a lot of special information needs to be passed around. Like many paletted codecs, the palette needs to be transmitted from the file demuxer to the video decoder via some side channel. For re-encoding, this also implies that the palette needs to make the trip from the video encoder to the file muxer. As if this wasn’t enough, individual VMD frames have even more data that needs to be ferried between the muxer and codec levels, including frame change boundaries. FFmpeg provides methods to do these things, but I could not always rely on the systems to relay the data in all cases. I was probably doing something wrong ; I accept that. Instead, I just packed all the information at the front of an encoded frame and split it apart in the muxer.

  I could not quite figure out how to get the audio and video muxed correctly. As a result, neither FFmpeg nor the Phantasmagoria engine could replay the files correctly.

  Plan B
  Since I was having so much trouble creating an entirely new VMD file, likely due to numerous unknown bits of the file format, I thought of another angle : re-use the existing VMD file. For this approach, I kept the video encoder and file muxer that I created in the initial phase, but modified the file muxer to emit a special intermediate file. Then, I created a Python tool to repackage the original VMD file using compressed video data in the intermediate file.

  For this phase, I also implemented a command line switch for FFmpeg to disable subtitle blending, to make the feature feel like less of an unofficial hack, as though this nonsense would ever have a chance of being incorporated upstream.

  At this point, I was seeing some success with the complete, albeit roundabout, subtitling process. I constructed a subtitle file using “Spanish I Learned From Mexican Telenovelas” and the frames turned out fairly readable :

  
  

  

  “she cheated on him”

  
  

  

  “he’s a scumbag” … these random subtitles could fit surprisingly well !

  
  

  The few files that I tested appeared to work fine. But then I handed off my work to The Translator and he immediately found a bunch of problems. According to my notes, the problems mostly took the form of flashing, solid color frames. Further, I found tiny, mostly imperceptible flaws in my RLE compressor, usually only detectable by running strict comparison tools ; but I wasn’t satisfied.

  At this point, I think I attempted to just encode the entire palette at the front of each frame, as allowed by the format, but that did not seem to fix any problems. My notes are not completely clear on this matter (likely because I was still trying to figure out the exact problem), but I think it had to do with FFmpeg inserting extra video frames in order to even out gaps in the video framerate.

  Sigh, Plan C
  At this point, I was getting tired of trying to force FFmpeg to do this. So I decided to minimize its involvement using lessons learned up to this point.

  The next pitch :

  1. Create a new C program that can open an existing VMD file and output an identical VMD file. I know this sounds easy, but the specific method of copying entails interpreting individual parts of the file and writing those individual parts to the new file. This is in preparation for…
  2. Import the VMD video decoder functions directly into the program to decode the individual video frames and re-encode them, replacing the video frames as the file is rewritten.
  3. Wire up the subtitle system. During the adventure to disable subtitle blending, I accidentally learned enough about interfacing to the subtitle library to just invoke it directly.
  4. Rewrite the RLE method so that it is 100% correct.

  Off to work I went. That part about lifting the existing VMD decoder functions out of their libavcodec nest turned out to not be that straightforward. As an alternative, I modified the decoder to dump the raw frames to an intermediate file. In doing so, I think I was able to avoid the issue of the duplicated frames that plagued the previous efforts.

  Also, remember how I was really pleased with the palette conversion technique in which I was able to leverage computer science big-O theory ? By this stage, I had no reason to convert the paletted video to RGB in the first place ; all of the decoding, subtitling and re-encoding operates in the paletted colorspace.

  This approach seemed to work pretty well. The final program is subtitle-vmd.c. The process is still a little weird. The modifications in my own FFmpeg fork are necessary to create an intermediate file that the new C tool can operate with.

  Next Steps
  The Translator has found some assorted bugs and corner cases that still need to be ironed out. Further, for extra credit, I need find the change windows for each frame to improve compression just a little more. I don’t think I will be trying for LZ compression, though.

  However, almost as soon as I had this whole system working, The Translator informed me that there is another, different movie format in play in the Phantasmagoria engine called ROBOT, with an extension of RBT. Fortunately, enough of the algorithms have been reverse engineered and re-implemented in ScummVM that I was able to sort out enough details for another subtitling project. That will be the subject of a future post.

  See Also :

  • Subtitling Sierra RBT Files : The followup in which I discuss how to scribble text on the other animation format

• Running Windows XP In 2016

  2 janvier 2016, par Multimedia Mike

  I have an interest in getting a 32-bit Windows XP machine up and running. I have a really good yet slightly dated and discarded computer that seemed like a good candidate for dedicating to this task. So the question is : Can Windows XP still be installed from scratch on a computer, activated, and used in 2016 ? I wasn’t quite sure since I have heard stories about how Microsoft has formally ended support for Windows XP as of the first half of 2014 and I wasn’t entirely sure what that meant.

  Spoiler : It’s still possible to install and activate Windows XP as of the writing of this post. It’s also possible to download and install all the updates published up until support ended.

  The Candidate Computer
  This computer was assembled either in late 2008 or early 2009. It was a beast at the time.

  
  
  Click for a larger image
  

  It was built around the newly-released NVIDIA GTX 280 video card. The case is a Thermaltake DH-101, which is a home theater PC thing. The motherboard is an Asus P5N32-SLI Premium with a Core 2 Duo X6800 2.93 GHz CPU on board. 2 GB of RAM and a 1.5 TB hard drive are also present.

  The original owner handed it off to me because their family didn’t have much use for it anymore (too many other machines in the house). Plus it was really, obnoxiously loud. The noisy culprit was the stock blue fan that came packaged with the Intel processor (seen in the photo) whining at around 65 dB. I replaced the fan and brought the noise level way down.

  As for connectivity, the motherboard has dual gigabit NICs (of 2 different chipsets for some reason) and onboard wireless 802.11g. I couldn’t make the latter work and this project was taking place a significant distance from my wired network. Instead, I connected a USB 802.11ac dongle and antenna which is advertised to work in both Windows XP and Linux. It works great under Windows XP. Meanwhile, making the adapter work under Linux provided a retro-computing adventure in which I had to modify C code to make the driver work.

  So, score 1 for Windows XP over Linux here.

  The Simple Joy of Retro-computing
  One thing you have to watch out for when you get into retro-computing is fighting the urge to rant about the good old days of computing. Most long-time computer users have a good understanding of the frustration that computers keep getting faster by orders of magnitude and yet using them somehow feels slower and slower over successive software generations.
  

  This really hits home when you get old software running, especially on high-end hardware (relative to what was standard contemporary hardware). After I got this new Windows XP machine running, as usual, I was left wondering why software was so much faster a few generations ago.

  Of course, as mentioned, it helps when you get to run old software on hardware that would have been unthinkably high end at the software’s release. Apparently, the minimum WinXP specs as set by MS are a 233 MHz Pentium CPU and 64 MB of RAM, with 1.5 GB of hard drive space. This machine has more than 10x the clock speed (and 2 CPUs), 32x the RAM, and 1000x the HD space. Further, I’m pretty sure 100 Mbit ethernet was the standard consumer gear in 2001 while 802.11b wireless was gaining traction. The 802.11ac adapter makes networking quite pleasant.

  Purpose
  Retro-computing really seems to be ramping up in popularity lately. For some reason, I feel compelled to declare at this juncture that I was into it before it was cool.

  Why am I doing this ? I have a huge collection of old DOS/Windows computer games. I also have this nerdy obsession with documenting old video games in the MobyGames database. I used to do a lot of this a few years ago, tracking the effort on my gaming blog. In the intervening years, I have still collected a lot of old, unused, unloved video games, usually either free or very cheap while documenting my collection efforts on that same blog.

  So I want to work my way through some of this backlog, particularly the games that are not yet represented in the MobyGames database, and even more pressing, ones that the internet (viewed through Google at least) does not seem to know about. To that end, I thought this was a good excuse to get Windows XP on this old machine. A 32-bit Windows XP machine is capable of running any software advertised as supporting Windows XP, Windows ME, Windows 98, Windows 95, and even 16-bit Windows 3.x (I have games for all these systems). That covers a significant chunk of PC history. It can probably be made to run DOS games as well, but those are (usually) better run under DosBox. In order to get the right display feel, I even invested in a (used) monitor sporting a 4:3 aspect ratio. If I know these old games, most will be engineered and optimized for that ratio rather than the widescreen resolutions seen nowadays.

  I would also like to get back to that Xbox optical disc experimentation I was working on a few years ago. Another nice feature of this motherboard is that it still provides a 40-pin IDE/PATA adapter which makes the machine useful for continuing that old investigation (and explains why I have that long IDE cable to no where pictured hanging off the board).

  The Messy Details
  I did the entire installation process twice. The first time was a bumbling journey of discovery and copious note-taking. I still have Windows XP installation media that includes service pack 2 (SP2), along with 2 separate licenses that haven’t been activated for a long time. My plan was to install it fresh, then install the relevant drivers. Then I would investigate the Windows update and activation issues and everything should be fine.

  So what’s the deal with Windows Update for XP, and with activations ? Second item first : it IS possible to still activate Windows XP. The servers are still alive and respond quickly. However, as always, you don’t activate until you’re sure everything is working at some baseline. It took awhile to get there.

  As for whether Windows Update still works for XP, that’s a tougher question. Short answer is yes ; longer answer is that it can be difficult to kick off the update process. At least on SP2, the “Windows Update” program launches IE6 and navigates to a special microsoft.com URL which initiates the update process (starting with an ActiveX control). This URL no longer exists.

  From what I can piece together from my notes, this seems to be the route I eventually took :

  1. Install Windows XP fresh
  2. Install drivers for the hardware ; fortunately, Asus still has all the latest drivers necessary for the motherboard and its components but it’s necessary to download these from another network-connected PC since the networking probably won’t be running “out of the box”
  3. Download the .NET 3.5 runtime, which is the last one supported by Windows XP, and install it
  4. Download the latest NVIDIA drivers ; this needs to be done after the previous step because the installer requires the .NET runtime ; run the driver installer and don’t try to understand why it insists on re-downloading .NET 3.5 runtime before installation
  5. While you’re downloading stuff on other computers to be transported to this new machine, be sure to download either Chrome or Firefox per your preference ; if you try to download via IE6, you may find that their download pages aren’t compatible with IE6
  6. Somewhere along the line (I’m guessing as a side effect of the .NET 3.5 installation), the proper, non-IE6-based Windows Update program magically springs to life ; once this happens, there will be 144 updates (in my case anyway) ; installing these will probably require multiple reboots, but SP3 and all known pre-deprecation security fixes will be installed
  7. Expect that, even after installing all of these, a few more updates will appear ; eventually, you’ll be at the end of the update road
  8. Once you’re satisfied everything is working satisfactorily, take the plunge and activate your installation

  Residual Quirks
  Steam runs great on Windows XP, as do numerous games I have purchased through the service. So that opens up a whole bunch more games that I could play on this machine. Steam’s installer highlights a curious legacy problem of Windows XP– it seems there are many languages that it does not support “out of the box” :

  
  
  

  It looks like the Chinese options and a few others that are standard now weren’t standard 15 years ago.

  Also, a little while after booting up, I’ll get a crashing error concerning a process called geoforms.scr. This appears to be NVIDIA-related. However, I don’t notice anything obviously operationally wrong with the system.

  Regarding DirectX support, DirectX 9 is the highest version officially supported by Windows XP. There are allegedly methods to get DirectX 10 running as well, but I don’t care that much. I did care, briefly, when I realized that a bunch of the demos for the NVIDIA GTX 280 required DX10 which left me wondering why it was possible to install them on Windows XP.

  Eventually, by installing enough of these old games, I fully expect to have numerous versions of .NET, DirectX, QT, and Video for Windows installed side by side.

  Out of curiosity, I tried playing a YouTube HD/1080p video. I wanted to see if the video was accelerated through my card. The video played at full speed but I noticed some tearing. Then I inspected the CPU usage and noticed that the CPU was quite loaded. So either the GTX 280 doesn’t have video acceleration, or Windows XP doesn’t provide the right APIs, or Chrome is not able to access the APIs in Windows XP, or perhaps some combination of the foregoing.

  Games are working well, though. I tried one of my favorite casual games and got sucked into that for, like, an entire night because that’s what casual games do. But then, I booted up a copy of WarCraft III that I procured sometime ago. I don’t have any experience with the WarCraft universe (RTS or MMO) but I developed a keen interest in StarCraft II over the past few years and wanted to try WarCraft III. Unfortunately, I couldn’t get WarCraft III to work correctly on several different Windows 7 installations (movies didn’t play, which left me slightly confused as to what I was supposed to do).

  Still works beautifully on the new old Windows XP machine.