Cool! Back in 2001 I had the domain TheLostVikings.com
Wow, it's still on the ISP hosting. I haven't seen this in years: http://homepage.eircom.net/~lostvikings/
The download links are broken but lots of animated gifs are still there.
Too bad visitor counter doesn't work. It's interesting how back in the day lot of sites had visitor counters displayed. Still wondering why this was done, possibly because this was the only way author could see the count of his visitors himself.
You can register your CD key with Battle.Net which puts Diablo II in your "library" for download in fully-patched installer form. It was handy for a LAN night with friends because sharing the installer around was easier and quicker than swapping discs.
Really neat project! The tools are released under CC-0 on Github.
The HN thread [1] on Part 1 went into discussion about how platform differences and the prospect of more rapid iteration meant that several early games were written with VMs. It's amusing that when we resurrect these games today, we are often running a VM that emulates an old architecture that then runs the original game's VM in turn.
The Lost Vikings was a favorite of mine growing up. I remember jumping amd yelling at the screen while playing it with my sister.
I have always had a passion to hack and mod anything and everything. I think I'm going to make some time this weekend to see what I can do with The Lost Vikings.
Looks like Game Maker (a tool for creating video games using scripting). Very interesting stuff. Anyone knows if other ports of TLV, e.g. SNES, use the same virtual machine?
It seems likely that they would as the purpose of the virtual machine seems to be to make porting to other systems easier. If you can extract the data files from the SNES version (or another port) then it is possible that the pack_tool (from https://github.com/RyanMallon/TheLostVikingsTools) will be able to extract the chunks containing the virtual machine programs. The format of the virtual machine programs might be a bit different. For example the load/store instructions for globals in DS may not be directly portable to other architectures (at the very least I would expect global offsets to be different). The rest of the vm design appears to be fairly portable though.
One would think so but I went and checked. In a Lost Vikings SNES ROM image, search for a sequence of VM opcodes. The turret program shown has a bit that goes 97 00 01 00 9C 18 08 2F 00, doesn't seem to contain any addresses and is long enough to not just appear at random. It shows up in the ROM image so it looks like yes, the VM was used in the SNES version too.
Cool. Is the data not compressed in the SNES ROMs or were you reading the data directly from memory? In the DOS version the DATA.DAT file contains a bunch of chunks, most of which (including the vm programs) are compressed using an LZSS type compression.
The image seemed to be uncompressed, or at least, the relevant parts of it were uncompressed. I'd guess they had to be much pickier how what and where to compress, given the constraints of the system.
No, compression was used extensively. Just often hand-rolled and for specific things. https://multimedia.cx/eggs/nes-compression/ has a link to an RLE implementation used in some Zelda game.
Oh I bet it's because they ran the VM programs straight out of ROM. This is saves more than compressing and then wasting precious RAM on them. Not an issue on the PC.
Wow, it's still on the ISP hosting. I haven't seen this in years: http://homepage.eircom.net/~lostvikings/ The download links are broken but lots of animated gifs are still there.