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I remember having Commander Keen on my 486 and it was the first game where I realized the levels were stored in plain ascii. Changing the ascii values would dir
by mrspeaker 9y ago
I remember having Commander Keen on my 486 and it was the first game where I realized the levels were stored in plain ascii. Changing the ascii values would directly change the level... I lost so many hours of my life to that!
- lkbm 9y agoThey are?! I would've had so much fun with that as a kid. Is this true of all Keens? 4 was my first and favorite.
- khedoros1 9y agoDoesn't seem like it: http://www.shikadi.net/moddingwiki/Commander_Keen_1-3_Level_format http://www.shikadi.net/moddingwiki/Commander_Keen_1-3_Level_... http://www.shikadi.net/moddingwiki/RLEW_compression http://www.shikadi.net/moddingwiki/RLEW_compression Looking at a hexdump of the Keen1 file matches those specs. Keen 4 uses another, more complicated kind of compression, too: http://www.shikadi.net/moddingwiki/Carmack_compression http://www.shikadi.net/moddingwiki/Carmack_compression They might be thinking of earlier Id software games. Some of those weren't compressed, and you could at least edit them with a hex editor pretty easily.
- coroxout 9y agoThat wiki is brilliant, thanks!
- geon 9y agoI spent so much time redrawing tiles in Micromachines 2. Good times.
- giobox 9y agoOne of my colleagues recently fired up dosbox and showed me his old level editing tricks for a ton of DOS classics. I was mildly annoyed at my young self for having never considered trying this! Similar simple edits often work on save file data from games of this era as well, and often don't need a hex editor etc.