Pointless CC Trivia Thread

[JDGP030302]

The original Chip's Challenge for the Atari Lynx was released in Japan. As with most ther japanese Lynx games, the only notable change is the manual wich is in color and have a different artwork. It features Chip carrying a rather large chip entering a room (actually a white void) with a door labeled "Bit Busters", in said room are two girls, one wich is happy and looking at Chip. I can only guess that she is Melinda. Note that she is not blonde like how she appears in the ending cutscene nor she is wearing anything blue. I couldn't find a scan of that manual, wich is a shame since it is in color and i guess it could have interesting artwork, and also since this picture has a very low resolution.

   

Picture source

[JDGP030302]

The Lynx version of Chip's Challenge was re-released for the Evercade, a console released in 2020 dedicated exclusively to retro games compilations. The cartridge is called Atari Lynx Collection 2. Taking into account that the re-releases are officially licensed (and it is not the only Epyx game featured in that cartridge) and that Chuck Somerville had a VERY HARD time trying to release the sequel , i just can wonder how this happened. 

See here

[JDGP030302]

The soundtrack of Chip's Challenge for Lynx have 13 tracks plus the title screen and the ending music.

 Levels where a new track is introduced:
#  Name
1 Lesson 1
2 Lesson 2
3 Lesson 3
4 Lesson 4
5 Lesson 5
7 Lesson 7
10 Brushfire
11 Trinity
15 Elementary
18 Castle moat
20 Tossed salad
23 Blobnet
33 On the rocks

Notes:
* "Lesson 4" is similar to  "Lesson 2"
* "Lesson 7" is similar to the title screen tune.
* The ending tune is a variation of "Brushfire"
*  "Tossed salad" is almost identical to "Elementary", but one of the "instruments" have an higher pitch.


By the way, someone ripped this amazing soundtrack and uploaded it to Youtube!

[JDGP030302]

The in-game soundtrack of Chip's Challenge for DOS is based on the original one for Lynx, it have 8 (out of the 13) tracks, one for each Lesson level:

DOS - Lynx original (Level number)
Lesson 1 - Lesson 1 (1)
Lesson 2 - Lesson 5 (5)
Lesson 3 - Trinity (11)
Lesson 4 - Elementary (15)
Lesson 5 - Castle moat (18)
Lesson 6 - Tossed salad (20)
Lesson 7 - Lesson 3 (3)
Lesson 8 - Lesson 2 (2) OR Lesson 4 (4)

Notes:
* Just as the Lynx original, "Lesson 6" is a variation of "Lesson 4". Also, they are slightly different compared to Lynx.
* Tracks left out: Lesson 7 (7), Brushfire (10), Trinity (11) Blobnet (23), On the rocks (33) and the ending.
* The title screen music is basically the same.
* There is not a specific tune for the ending (just continue playing the music from the previous level, like the messages).

* As it was normal for DOS games, it supports several kinds of audio hardware, for both music and SFX, including Adlib compatible, Tandy 3 voice, Roland MT 32 (MIDI), and...PC speaker (beeper).


By the way, someone ripped the Adlib version of this slightly less awesome soundtrack to VGMRips.

[Zrax]

There is only one CC2 level (ARTIC2.C2M) which contains a "CBMP" data field. In this map, it contains a 32x32 bitmap of an ice block.

[The Architect]

There is only one CC2 level (ARTIC2.C2M) which contains a "CBMP" data field.  In this map, it contains a 32x32 bitmap of an ice block.

Is that what it is! I spent quite a bit of time trying to figure that out. What clued you in?

[Zrax]

Is that what it is! I spent quite a bit of time trying to figure that out. What clued you in?

Mostly the field name; "CBMP" looks like "Compressed Bitmap"... From there, it was a matter of getting the bits to make sense. It helped when I decompressed it using the usual LZSS-like decompression, and saw a distinct pattern in my hex editor. The fact that the pattern was visible made me think it might be indexed color, so I manually added a bitmap header (with a negative height to flip the row order) and copied the color table from original.bmp, and suddenly "hey, this looks familiar" :)

[JDGP030302]

Excellent, we need more high quality trivia like this, no matter how technical, just needs a good explanation! Could you upload the files you created? Also, we need to ask Joshua Bone if he knows how this ended in the file for this level (which was made by him). Or Chuck Somerville, who knows.

Oh, and by the way, in "Trials of elements", in CC2, there is a shortcut to clear the level faster, with the hint tile existing only to the acknowledge that the player achieved reaching said shortcut. Hint: North of the exit tile. Fire boots and flippers needed for the best time.

[Zrax]

Could you upload the files you created?

Sure, here's the result.  It should look pretty familiar though... ;)

[The Architect]

Neat! I did get as far as decompressing it, but the pattern didn't particularly stand out to me. Though the decompressed size of 1024 did seem suspicious.