Retooling Striders palette

[TurboXray]

 A comparison pic...

/comparison1.png

Here's a replacement track with the modified Strider sprite colors - Revision 1. It's just the sprite so far.

 Revision 2 is available. Changed some more sprites and mini boss.

[nat]

This is probably a retarded question for everyone who actually owns the Turbo version of this game, but which is the original and which is revised? I think the one on the left looks better.

[TurboXray]

Yeah, the left one is the new palette <_<

[nat]

Awesome, I was on the edge of my seat with the fear I may have dealt a MAJOR BURN.

[awack]

That looks great, you did a good job on making the detail on strider pop out and bringing the colors close to the arcade, i also like what you did with the buildings, getting rid of those funky color combination, are those shots from different emulators...i see subtle differences in colors on the ledge/platform?

[TurboXray]

Same emulator. I changed some of the platform colors too - slightly. It's not in the link though, just the main sprite. I'll release the BG color retooling after I do some more sprites.

[Tatsujin]

great mal..couldn't you just revise the whole palette of the whole game like that PLUS add 60fps scrolling to the game PLUS press it on a CD and hand it out to all those poor AC strider owners?

[TurboXray]

Tatsujin: I've love to smack 'round those bastar....er dev team.

 Did some more sprites.

 Here's a really mangled sprite -
/mini_boss_comp.png

Left my pal mod, middle is the original, right is the Arcade. Not only did they mangle the palette, they also used some wrong colors. See his belt. One other color was repeated, yet the pixels were still there but appeared as lack of detail <_<

 It definitely looks like the did some automated conversion job and on the sprite pixels and palettes. Probably why the palettes choices are so dark. Funny thing, it's not even a direct conversion (a shift and clip). Thy did retouch up one sprite manually - the little robot with the fox hat.

Here's the new revision ISO replacement track.

[Joe Redifer]

Keep up the good work.  You're gonna be pulling hairs out by the time you get to stage 2.

[Keranu]

Wow, great work! The colors they used in the original ACD version are very poor for PCE standards!

[ParanoiaDragon]

IIRC, you said this game is a nightmare of sorts codewise(though, maybe not as much as Ys 3), so, with that said, bring on some paralax!

[peperocket]

Maybe the code was initially writen for super grafx ??? 

[CrackTiger]

This is amazing.

My biggest problem with the game is the palette, I can enjoy the game for what it is otherwise. This is going to transform the game.

Do you think that it will be possible to restore some of the missing shades in the background (compared to the original ACD) in the future?

[termis]

Yeah, this is an awesome project.  Color choices for this port was so horrible!  I dunno what they were thinking.

Keep us up to date on the progress.

[TurboXray]

I was working on the boss area for stage one. There was something definitely wrong with their automation tool. That or the original project gotten some corruption and they didn't realize it.

 Take a look at the boss chars:
/421.png/418.png
The pic on the left is the original ACD palette. There's no way that could be what they wanted  Green hands and face!?
 
 I'm not changing the pixels in these frames, just the colors associated with them. They match up perfect with the arcade. This means either the palette data got corrupted in the project before pressing or they employed a 3 year old to over see the colors.

 In the data track, there multiple instances of the same boss sprites/data. The funny thing is there not all the same in regards to pixel # alignment. They reordered the pixel #'s in the final sprites for some reason and it's not for color recycling or reduction. Weird.

 The first boss has issues of crossed colors/pixels and the damn thing is compressed. Looks like I need to figure that out and decompress them.

Do you think that it will be possible to restore some of the missing shades in the background (compared to the original ACD) in the future?

Dunno. I'll need to dig deeper and decompress the tiles.

 Edit:

 This keeps on getting weirder. Ok, I figured out the decompression routine. Should be simple enough to write an external compressor/decompressor. When the AVE logo is spinning in the beginning/startup of the game, it's loading the first level data. The weird part is that it's loading multiple 192k segments and then decompressing them to arcade card memory. The strange this is that it's using old and almost useless RLE word based compression for PCE format of graphics. It's an old compression method from before '92 for most PCE games. When this game came out, almost all CD games that I know of used the much more efficient LZSS compression. The second strange part is 192k is usually how SCD games load data. 64k code is left intact of 256k memory and level/data/graphics are loaded usually as a single 192k chunk. Not only that, but these 192k chunks contain some redundant tiles - like the stage was divided up into 3-4 segments. That, and the left over garbage data in the CD track contains tiles and sprites from a '91 CD game. Just further proof in my mind that this was an old SCD project.

 Another thing. In the data track, there are tons of sheets of uncompressed sprites - all the bosses and enemies. Of course the game doesn't load these for some odd reason. But the peculiar thing I noticed, using a palette match, is that those uncompressed sprites have some of the color #'s in different places. Given that some of the sprites really do have the wrong colors in certain places of the final game definitely leads me to believe whoever was responsible for those sprites, their graphics didn't end up making it into the AC ram. Instead the originals were used. Speculation of course, but things are fitting together suspiciously well. 

[awack]

So it uses an older compression method, maybe a CD or CD/SCD game, it loads 192k chunks like SCD games and was released as a ACD game, the pc engine equivalent of Frankenstein,s monster.

The palette for the strider sprite as it appears in the extra or bonus level is different from the rest of the game:

[ParanoiaDragon]

I figured the pallete for that level was different since it's in the middle of the desert in full daylight.

[awack]

Yea, i thought that at first as I'm sure most do, and that might be the case, but a few things struck me as odd, for one, other levels take place at night or in the day,such as the jungle, but of course its not the desert, then i noticed that not only was the palette of Strider different but so was the palette for the health an sword power up, the health icon went from brown and yellow to gray and white, but the flying drone enemy uses the exact same palette as from other levels....its at the very least a continuity problem.

[termis]

Sorry to necropost, but was there ever any more progress on this project?  Would looooove to see a clean version of PCE strider... 

[Ceti Alpha]

Sorry to necropost, but was there ever any more progress on this project?  Would looooove to see a clean version of PCE strider... 

hehe. I totally forgot about this project.