Prelude in D-flat

Inspired by this drawing by irons.

Download (4.2 MB mp3)

Atque

Atque is a tool for merging/splitting Marathon maps and images files. Atque is available for Mac OS X, Windows, and Linux, and can split maps and extract resources to regular files on all platforms, eliminating the need for ResEdit.

For instance, chapter screens and terminal pictures are exported as BMP or JPEG; CLUTs are exported as Adobe Color Table files; and chapter sounds are exported as WAVs. TEXT resources are stored as editable text files, allowing, for example, easy find-and-replace operations. Once split, these files can be edited with commonly available editors, and then merged together again into a Unimap 2 map or images file.

Unimap 2 files use the Marathon 2 for Windows 95 style of resources, where each resource is stored as a chunk in a level of appropriate resource ID in the wadfile. Some advantages over the old MacBinary Unimap format:

• Can be opened directly with Forge, to view/export levels
• No 16 MB limit on stored resources
• Removes dependence on the classic Mac OS utility ResEdit

There are a couple minor drawbacks:

• There is only one name per resource ID in Unimap 2, whereas Unimap allowed storing a name for each resource type/ID pair
• Aleph One 0.20.3 (9/13) is required to view Unimap 2 chapter screens / terminal pictures

In addition to resources, Atque handles levels, merged physics, merged shapes patches, and can compile and decompile terminal text. It has support for some terminal features Forge didn't, such as creating wide terminal pictures without resorting to the distasteful Cinemascope hack.

Atque is available under the GNU GPL. You can download Atque 1.0 binaries and source code from SourceForge: http://sourceforge.net/projects/igniferroque

A basic manual is available at
http://apps.sourceforge.net/mediawiki/igniferroque/index.php?title=Atque_Manual

Aleph One 0.20.3

A patch release of Aleph One is available from http://source.bungie.org/get or http://marathon.sourceforge.net/

This is a minor feature release of Aleph One, which includes Windows improvements and support for the Unimap 2 format. It is network compatible with Aleph One 0.20.x

Changes:

• Recognize PICT resources stored in M2-Win95 format (completes Unimap 2 support)
• AlephOne.exe now requires a Pentium-class processor. Windows 2000 or higher is recommended.
• Applied SDL patches from Tim Angus (from ioquake3) to allow DirectInput mouse control while OpenGL is active. If you have trouble with Vista, disable the "DirectDraw / DirectInput" option.
• Added window manager icons in Linux and Windows
• Added support for #STATIC terminal groups