Category: Quake Nostalgia
A little gem on the Sega Saturn’s Quake Soundtrack
Sometimes Twitter has a use. I’ve been using it to try convincing Sascha Dikiciyan (Sonic Mayhem) to release Methods of Destruction. Well, that did not work but I saw the following conversation:
- @toksin Sega’s Quake has xtra track on it that isn’t on the PC’s. By chance is that yours? Gracenote says it’s NIN’s but I’m skeptical.
7:22 PM Dec 31st, 2009 from web - @_Catalyst I think it was one of the left over tracks they used but i’m not sure myself!
8:28 PM Jan 1st from TweetDeck - @toksin TY 4 the response, was hoping to clarify, “End” sounds more like you, what I’d call a preface to q2 soundtrack imo. Not ambient NIN.
8:44 PM Jan 1st from web in reply to toksin - @toksin Sega credits you 4 ‘additional music’ , “B7″ from MOD and original music as Reznor’s. “End” is a track not on PC soundtrack, end=b7?
8:47 PM Jan 1st from web in reply to toksin - @_Catalyst b7 is the one. Rest was by nin of course! That track was only on the sega version!
9:11 PM Jan 1st from TweetDeck - @toksin so the 3 min track entitled as End is indeed b7? Yeah it freaked me out the PC/Sega soundtracks were diff. I felt robbed…lol
9:15 PM Jan 1st from web in reply to toksin
Quake for the Sega Saturn has an additional CD audio track, namely the track B7 from Sonic Mayhem’s Methods of Destruction. Well, I set out to get it and what I got was ugly. First of all, the track is only on the US release. And then comes something really ugly. They shrunk all the originals tracks. Not only on the US release to make room for the track. But also on the PAL/EU one where it would not be needed. Well, lazy porting after licensing issues I guess.
Take a look at this if you want a glimpse. The first one is always the full PC soundtrack. Long story short, I decided to host a copy of the track until further notice. You could also get a used copy of Quake for the Sega Saturn (the US version!) very cheaply (just wait if there is no decent offer anywhere).
Tim Elek about his mapping
Some days ago I randomly bumped into an old blog of Tim Elek. You should know that name, he has made great Quake singleplayer releases, not to mention his work for Nehahra. He wrote a long piece about his Quake mapping which I highly recommend to read. Nowadays he is working at Raven Software, many Quake mappers work(ed) there. His Planetquake site is gone of course. Damn you, IGN, especially for not being upright on those “maintenance” pages. At least you could serve a HTTP error 404 or even a 410 instead of a redirection circus ending in 200. Thanks to CocoT there is an archive of the site, I uploaded it for browsing here.
Quake – Arcade Tournament Edition
You probably heard of the Quake – Arcade Tournament Edition. An arcade machine with Quake built by LBE Systems/Lazer-Tron in 1998.
Supposedly only twenty of these prototypes were manufactured. When the game was first introduced, Lazer-Tron was bought out and due to problems with the contracted programmer, the game was never further developed.
Just recently I understood what MAME is all about and eventually I knew how to get nearer to this thing. And yes, to my gratitude there actually is a harddisk image of this machine floating around in torrents. The file is named quakeat.chd (225 Megabytes) and you might find it in some huge romsets (CHD/LD are terms you will want to look for).
That quakeat.chd is the image of the harddisk from the arcade machine. You cannot run it through MAME at the time of writing because at least the BIOS image is missing. But you can mount the disk image and take a peek inside. Following is how I managed to do that (on Linux, have fun on Windows…) and some of what I found.
Extraction
$ file quakeat.chd
quakeat.chd: MAME CHD compressed hard disk image, version 4
So let’s uncompress that image. MAME comes with a tool for that job, chdman (do get the latest official binaries, if you get an error about a wrong format, that’s what you did not do). I used Wine below because I could not be arsed to hunt for a Linux binary.
$ wine chdman.exe -extract quakeat.chd quakeat.img
[Output stripped]
$ file quakeat.img
quakeat.img: x86 boot sector, Microsoft Windows XP mbr,Serial 0x31f533a1; partition 1: ID=0xb, active, starthead 1, startsector 63, 4225473 sectors, code offset 0x33
Now you cannot simply mount that image, it contains a mbr. Checking the file with fdisk shows where the actual data partition starts.
$ fdisk -l -u quakeat.img
You must set cylinders.
You can do this from the extra functions menu.Disk quakeat.img: 0 MB, 0 bytes
128 heads, 63 sectors/track, 0 cylinders, total 0 sectors
Units = sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes
Disk identifier: 0x31f533a1Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
quakeat.img1 * 63 4225535 2112736+ b W95 FAT32
So the size of a sector is 512 bytes and the partition we want starts at sector 63. 63*512 = 32256. Thankfully you can tell mount where to start.
$ mount -o loop,offset=32256 quakeat.img /where/ever/you/want/
Examination
Now, what’s inside and can you run it? It looks like a (almost) normal Quake installation. The pak files in id1 are extracted. There is a glquake.exe but sadly it will tell you “E020C — Security key not found”. Seems like one would need a dongle. The engine also seems to have been modified to display AVI movies. There is a directory with movies inside that are referenced in quake.rc alternating with normal demos. They show instructions, credits and company logos.
There are some files related to accounting and prizes. 6 progs (progs.dat, progshipnotic.dat, Progsreaper.dat, progsqtv.dat (clanring something), progsrogue.dat, progszeus.dat). I could not figure out how to run the “Arcade Tournament” game though. Maybe someone more into QC and hacking will shed more light onto it.
The default.cfg says Quake – Arcade Tournament Edition 1.30 r3, it also contains a password (could that be related to the engine?) and suggests that opus.exe is related to the Joystick. There are many variables prefixed with a_ which suggests “arcade_”.
It seems like the two official missionpacks are included. Also a ctf1.bsp and qdqstart.bsp (which is quite a weird modified start map, most probably not related to Quake done Quick). There are also modified player models showing the current weapon (like vweps in some QW configurations nowadays).
Well, that’s it. Hooray for nostalgia. I can cross this one off my list now. :)
Conservation of Planetquake-hosted Quake sites
A bunch of Quakers are actively archiving the soon to be deleted hosted websites from Planetquake. If you want to follow progress or even help out, check out the Inside3D forums: IGN Decides To “discontinue Free Hosting Services” -> Quake Archiving Project
Make sure you read them wholly before you start contributing. It is not as easy as one might wish. :(
Planetquake being stabbed to death by IGN
Cocot posted about it at func: IGN, the (bastard) mother company of all Planet*-sites, Gamespy et cetera has decided to pull the plug on their free hosting.
After years of quality free hosting for gaming sites, we have decided to discontinue our free hosting services.
-> The Hosting Services will end on 11.59 PM, August 31st, 2009.
-> No backups or snapshots will be maintained after that date (download everything you wish to keep). You will no longer have access to your site or any aspects of it (content, assets, files etc.) after that date and we will remove/delete all such files from our servers.
Files currently hosted at Fileplanet will stay but all the websites will be wiped off the face of the Planets.
Ok, so let’s just mirror all the websites, eh? Well, thanks to the idiotic random-url-gamespy-domain-screw-up this is next to impossible to automate:
http://www.planetquake.com/polycount/ became http://hosted.planetquake.gamespy.com/polycount/
http://www.planetquake.com/underworld became http://underworld.planetquake.gamespy.com/
And some sites redirect from http://www.planetquake.com/website/ to http://planetquake.gamespy.com/website/ just to show some generic hosting page.
Oh well, I’ll see what I (and others) can do to preserve those.
Update: Actually http://hosted.planetquake.gamespy.com/website seems to work consistently. But all the non-relative links on sites are broken.
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Easily install and launch Quake maps with the cross-platform 