DOS Version of Chips Challenge

[budugoo]

I recently downloaded the DOS version of CC - It's a nice port... How come this version is not discussed as often as the others? It has the niceties of both MS and Lynx (though it's mostly Lynx, but without explosion of splash delay ). I haven't even started playing them seriously - anybody else interested?

[uyjulian]

I recently downloaded the DOS version of CC - It's a nice port... How come this version is not discussed as often as the others? It has the niceties of both MS and Lynx (though it's mostly Lynx, but without explosion of splash delay ). I haven't even started playing them seriously - anybody else interested?

i played it too

[tensorpudding]

I don't know if there's a freely-available tool which can convert MSCC .DAT file format into the levelset format used by the DOS CC, or even if the DOS CC format has been reverse-engineered.

The graphics are a lot less nice than the Lynx for some reason as well. Hurts my eyes.

[budugoo]

Oh - anyway, can KeyboardWielder add a small DOS option to TW2 (I think it can work like the pedantic option) - If we are to bring in all aspects of Chip's Challenge, shouldn't other ports come into consideration as well?

[Eric119]

Brian Raiter's "c4" tool can convert between DOS and other formats.

[John Elliott]

I've written up the DOS level format (based mainly on how C4 processes it) at http://www.seasip.info/ccdos.html .

[breadbox]

Hey John, thanks for writing all that up. I really should have done that myself, but I guess I never got around to it.

ccexplore and I decoded the file format independently of each other. If it had been only one of us, that person would probably have written it down for the benefit of the other, but as it happened it never was necessary.

I can't tell you how excited I was to have this format decoded, especially after ccexplore pointed out that the DOS files were identical to the ones embedded in the Lynx ROM image. Up until that time, everything I knew about the Lynx game came from experimenting with the original 148 levels. Any situation that I couldn't engineer within those levels couldn't be explored. Do tanks on ice turn around if you press a blue button? Before this I had no way to tell. (They don't, by the way, and I fixed this in version 1.1.2.) Anyway, once I had this information and written c4 the Lynx logic went from like 95% accurate to 99% accurate.

[breadbox]

PS: I've started writing down the format of the CC2M files, used by the new release of CC1. It's here for anyone who's interested:

http://www.muppetlabs.com/~breadbox/soft...2mfmt.html

It doesn't cover any features that are specific to CC2; that's a whole other subject that I'm ignoring for the time being. There's a number of details that are still missing from the description, so if anyone can fill those in please let me know.

I suppose I should add this format to c4 at some point, just for completeness....