Camoto modding utility - Windows version

[Malvineous]

Hi all,

As some of you know, I have been working on a utility for editing DOS games called Camoto. While it has been available under Linux for a few years now, getting it to run under Windows has always been extremely difficult. I think for this reason almost nobody has used this program yet!

I have finally crossed the last hurdle (I hope) and have managed to produce a version of Camoto that seems to work under Windows. If anyone wishes to try it out, you can download it and see if you have any luck.

camoto-install-20131117.exe
Previous version: camoto-install-20130929.exe

There are a number of issues I am aware of that only affect the Windows version and I don't know how to fix:

• Audio output doesn't work (there's an error at startup.) This only prevents listening to music files, you can still import and export them.
• Working with EGA graphics is incredibly slow for some reason. Perhaps this is just the fact that I am using an evaluation version of Windows 7 through the VirtualBox emulator, so I would be interested to know whether other people experience similar issues.
• Most of my effort has gone into reverse engineering file formats, so the actual user interface still needs a lot of work. The level editor is usable for simpler games like Crystal Caves, but it's not really practical for more complex ones like Monster Bash.
• There's no icon because I can't draw. Submissions are very welcome

I hope the editor is relatively self explanatory, but here are a few tips:

• You need to create a new project for each game you want to edit. A copy of the game is stored in the project folder so you don't have to worry about accidentally overwriting your original.
• The level editor tells you what actions you can perform on the status bar. The one that seems to get people is "M-drag=scroll" which means to scroll around in the map, you need to drag the M (middle/wheel) button.
• The 'save project' menu item saves all open files. You must remember to save before testing maps, but be aware that some things (like importing new images) are saved immediately.
• There is no built in UNLZEXE support yet. Some games (like Crystal Caves) require you to manually decompress the .exe file after creating your project (the .exe to decompress is in the "data" directory inside your project folder)

If you run into any issues please let me know. If you have questions about how to mod a specific game, please start a new thread so this one can be used to discuss any problems getting Camoto up and running.

I hope you find this useful

[Lunick]

Amazing job, hopefully someone puts this to use so I can play some of these games again with a fresh start.

[DOSGuy]

Congratulations!

[Teppic]

Thanks! Finally got to try this out.

I like the overall look and that each game goes into it's own project folder.

Issues so far:
Made some edits to a map in Xargon. After saving and opening it didn't work anymore. It can't recognize the map format.
Sometimes scrolling through a map doesn't work. I get a tiny window over the map window which I can scroll through with the middle mouse button, but the normal window won't scroll. (My graphics card is kind of dying, so it might have something to do with that)

Feature request:
Be able to scroll through the map window with the arrow keys.

What are the chances of having God of Thunder added to this in the future?

[Malvineous]

Thanks for the feedback!

Xargon (and Jill of the Jungle) are still in a state of flux, so my apologies there. I thought Xargon worked but I may have broken it trying to add support for Jill (since they both more or less share the same map format.) Hopefully in the next release these two games will work properly.

The map (and tileset) editors use OpenGL for graphics, so any odd problems there I would put down to bugs in the graphics drivers - probably not much I can do about it unless I can reproduce the problem. I do want to add scrolling with the arrow keys though.

And yes, I fully intend to support God of Thunder. At the moment, the only formats documented on the ModdingWiki are some graphics, the sound effects and the music format. So these will be the only things implemented unless someone can reverse engineer the map format. I will probably have a go eventually, but there are still a number of things that I should really finish off first (like Xargon/Jill maps.)

[Malvineous]

I just posted an updated version which fixes a number of problems in Monster Bash. Still not perfect, but it doesn't make the game crash any more

Also, I spent most of today reverse engineering Vinyl Goddess From Mars, so the next version should let you edit VGFM levels too:

[MrFlibble]

Very impressive work! Keep 'em coming! ^_^

[Teppic]

I liked Vinyl Goddess From Mars, but someone should mod it so you have to replay everything since the last checkpoint if you die.

[Malvineous]

Just posted an updated version (2013-10-25) with improved Monster Bash support, early (incomplete) Vinyl map viewing and support for editing a couple of image formats in Raptor.

[MrFlibble]

Heh, that's certainly some steady progress! Great job!

[Litude]

Great work you've been doing! Personally I've been dying to take a look at the Raptor GLB files.

[Malvineous]

Thanks guys! Yes I was quite surprised nobody had figured out the Raptor GLB format yet, but at least that's done now. That just leaves the entire contents of the GLB files to figure out...

[Hallfiry]

Thanks guys! Yes I was quite surprised nobody had figured out the Raptor GLB format yet, but at least that's done now. That just leaves the entire contents of the GLB files to figure out...

I'll try my best. Just from randomly scrolling I can see images and palettes and probably some other stuff. It doesn't look compressed, so it should be easy as pie.

[EDIT] First finding: GLB files start with a table that has a width of 28 (base 10).

[Malvineous]

Oh I have reverse engineered the GLB format itself - the details (and decryption algorithm) are on the ModdingWiki, but most of the files inside the GLB are in unknown formats. If you're good at reverse engineering graphics files, I recommend downloading Camoto, extracting all the files from the GLB and then seeing if you can figure out the format of any of them! (Except for PIC files and palettes which are mostly known.) The main Raptor page on the ModdingWiki lists the file formats inside the GLB that are known.

[Hallfiry]

Oh I have reverse engineered the GLB format itself - the details (and decryption algorithm) are on the ModdingWiki, but most of the files inside the GLB are in unknown formats. If you're good at reverse engineering graphics files, I recommend downloading Camoto, extracting all the files from the GLB and then seeing if you can figure out the format of any of them! (Except for PIC files and palettes which are mostly known.) The main Raptor page on the ModdingWiki lists the file formats inside the GLB that are known.

Oh, sorry, then I have misread it. Then I'll just try the image files ^_^

[edit]
Looking at AGX files right now. From the way they are shifted and considerung the fact that same bytes can be in triplets or longer, I firstly assume that these are sprites with RLE compressed 00s for each line.