Keen: Modding

Any chance you'd be interested in implementing Keen map support in Camoto's libgamemaps? It already supports a few games (Monster Bash, Halloween Harry, Cosmo, Xargon, etc.) so it'd be nice to support Keen as well.

No argument there :-)

I'm afraid I've never looked in enough detail to know how standard it is. The common standard is that .exe files have relocation tables which I think are used to patch memory references, but then on top of this compilers produce .exe files with multiple sections - typically one for code, one for dat...

By the last paragraph I meant that the .exe file's header should indicate how much memory is required to store all the code. If you enlarge that number it should give you more space after the end of the .exe (in memory) to patch into, without encountering those problems.

Well as you've indicated in your steps, there is no step for "copy EGA data into video memory" so you'd have to write your own image loader routine to replace the LBM one. I don't know what format the LBM file is in, but if it's EGA format already (suitable for direct copying into video me...

Well I'm not sure I understand what you're trying to do! Instead of replacing the title screen in its current format, you want to write your own image loading routine to patch into the game .exe so that you can load the title screen in a different image format, then remove the decompression code and...

What are you trying to achieve? If you want to replace the start screen, can't you just create a new LBM file and compress it with Softlib?

Unfortunately I'm not familiar enough with compression or .exe files to be able to help very much. The decompression algorithm seems highly optimised, which doesn't make it easy to understand at the best of times. Having said that it doesn't look quite as bad as I thought. It seems the .exe header i...

The C source code for a few versions of unlzexe is readily available if that helps. This isn't a recent one, but it might provide a few pointers as to what it's doing. I had thought of doing the same thing for my modding tools, but unfortunately you have to deal with the structure of .exe files with...

NY00123 from the PCKF updated my old DRO2IMF utility a couple of weeks ago, so you can always use that to convert RAD (or any other Adlib format) into IMF, via DOSBox. To prove it works, here are some samples: neointro.rad neointro.imf smjoop.rad smjoop.imf Only shortcomings at the moment seem to be...

Does that command work? It doesn't look valid to me. Do you mean as two commands instead?

Wow, thanks again for all the useful info! It will take me some time to digest it all, but in the mean time I am not sure what you mean by whether the player falls on level loading - the player will fall if there is nothing to stand on (I just verified this by modding level 4 to place a block under ...

Wow, very impressive! What tools are you using to find out this sort of detail so quickly? With the warp zones you could possibly fake them by starting on the main level and then changing the X and Y coordinates to put the player at the correct starting point. Sounds like the viewport might need to ...

Hi all, This is slightly off-topic as it's related to non-Keen games (AFAIK Keen already supports it.) As some of you know I'm working on a level editor for a number of different games, and I'd like to add a shortcut key to load the level currently being edited in the game so you can see how it's pl...

I think there would be a lot more involved than that. The world map only has a tiny amount of 'state' to remember - apart from the score, ammo and number of lives, only the player location and which levels have been completed are necessary. If you were to extend this into in-level saving, you'd have...