Dangerous Dave in Copyright Infringement
Dangerous Dave in Copyright Infringement (DDiCI) is a small and incomplete game by id Software that led to the development of the Commander Keen 1-3 series. The game displays the at-the-time revolutionary smooth scrolling EGA graphics and is named after the fact that it involved the protagonist's graphics from Dangerous Dave with the tiles from Mario.
DDiCI was never completed or released, since it was never meant to be anything more than an internal proof of concept demonstration. However, John Romero released the game, complete with TED 1.0, on his website several years later. The game is interesting to study from a historical viewpoint as it can clearly be seen how later games were based on it. The game features two playable (but not completable) levels and the aforementioned level editor.
File formats
This section lists the major file formats used in the game.
- Commander Keen 1-3 Level format - LEVELxx.DD2 are game levels, slightly modified in that they are not RLEW compressed.
- DDiCI Graphics format a combined file containing all the game's graphics.
- Dave Score format - Scores are stored in SCORES.DD2, but not actually used.
- Keen 1-3 Tileinfo format - information about the properties of tiles are stored internally in the executable.
- Inverse Frequency Sound format - the sound file is stored internally and uses Apogees 'inverse frequency' sound format.
- Full-screen planar EGA All the graphics are in this format, stored in a single file.
- Text is contained in the executable, the executable is compressed with LZ compression, and can be uncompressed with UNLZEXE.
Notes
Although the file extension, .DD2 suggests that this game would be the sequel to Dangerous Dave, the actual sequel Dangerous Dave 2 was completed several years later, built on the since-developed Keen 1-3 engine.