Sonic and Sega Retro Message Board: Smidge204 - Viewing Profile - Sonic and Sega Retro Message Board

It's that time again!



For the past ten years SAGE has been a beacon of community activity. Starting September 18th we will be continuing the tradition - and you're invited! We are gathering Sonic fangames and related projects of all types to be featured at SAGE to help promote them. If you'd like to register your project (free and easy!) visit http://sagexpo.org/ to details!

We do more than just promote Sonic fandom! While that's our primary focus, we are always happy to include non-Sonic related projects. There's usually a few Mario games in there, for example... or completely original works. Our goal is to bring amateur gaming communities together, so we are happy to invite anyone that wants to participate!

And the events! As usual we're trying to get some additional community involvement by running some events for those who might not really be into the game creation scene. Usually focused on art and other non-technical activities. We're leaving the details vague for now since we want to keep some of the competitions secret a bit longer.

Last but not least, SAGE is happy to help promote the independently run Sonic the Hedgehog Hacking Contest 2011 which will be having a community voting period during SAGE week. If you're reading this, then you're probably a member of the community and can get a chance to vote for your favorite hack!

More details to come as we continue to coordinate. Hope to see you at SAGE2011!

A long, long time ago... almost eight years now... I started to work on converting SFGHQ's library of sprites from the proprietary Multimedia Fusion data files into more generic BMP sheets. Obviously this never happened, but I did lay some groundwork which I hope someone might find useful. Specifically, I started reverse-engineering the CCA file format so I could extract the sprite information from it. I also started doing the same for Game Maker files, with the hopes of maybe one day creating a utility that would be able to import and export various fangame related formats.

So since recent events have stirred up past memories, I rediscovered what I'd done and decided to let everyone in on it again. Maybe someone here will find it useful?

http://www.smidgeindustriesltd.com/CCA_File_Format.txt

http://www.smidgeindustriesltd.com/GM6_File_Format.txt

I also wrote a utility that extracts CCA data (though only for MMF 1.2 and 1.5 version files), which also created data files containing animation data in non-proprietary format; a precursor to what I'd later develop into the "Sprite Image Project" (SIP) file format.

I later developed a sister format to SIP - "Sprite Image Format" (SIF) which encapsulated the graphical data and animation data. These formats were supported by both the CCA extraction tool and an early sprite animation editor I made. Links here:

http://www.smidgeindustriesltd.com/CCARip_v1.7.zip

http://www.smidgeindustriesltd.com/SIF_File_Format.html

http://www.smidgeindustriesltd.com/SpriEdit.zip


Source code for the two utilities is available, though they're written in VisualBasic 6 :p
=Smidge=