Version 0.3.0 released

Release 0.3.0 is out — and it brings full-motion video and full support for 4MB Atari ST machines.

What's new?

This major release is closing the gaps towards feature-completeness: cutscenes and audio with full support for 4MB hardware.

Intro, mission briefings and other movie sequences play back in beautiful 16 colors, even on 8MHz CPUs. Sound effects, speech and music work even on 4MB machines, no strings attached. Command & Conquer for Atari ST is, as far as I know, the first Atari ST game with full-motion video.

The remix tool was updated for this pipeline — it converts VQA movies to STV (with quality and encoding-effort options) and prepares the new audio format.

How to play?

Download the release zip then use the web-based remix tool to prepare a complete distribution. Extract it somewhere on your (emulated or real) Atari ST hard drive and have fun playing the game!

If you already remixed for 0.2.x, run the remix tool again for 0.3.0 — audio and (optionally) video need the new conversion steps.

Don't hesitate to report any problems or hickups you encounter. Command & Conquer for Atari ST is a work in progress.

Technical information

Two technologies are the key enablers:

• A new video codec, STV, plays 16-color cutscenes using a codebook-based algorithm. This works even on 8MHz machines. Encoding (palette selection, tile matching, codebook updates) happens inside the web-based remix tool. See my Medium.com article for more information.

• A new audio format, AUDX, keeps sample data in external pools and pages small samples into a fixed-size cache. Longer streams read straight from the pool file. That way a 4MB machine can play both sound effects and music using only 192 kB of RAM.

I hope you'll like this release as much as I do. Have a lot of fun playing Command & Conquer!
—Jonas