The Blues Brothers
| Levels? |  Not editable |
|---|---|
| Tiles? | Not editable |
| Sprites? | Not editable |
| Fullscreen? | Not editable |
| Sound? | Not editable |
| Music? | Not editable |
| Text? | Not editable |
| Story/cutscenes? | Not editable |
| UI/menus? | Not editable |
| Demos? | Unknown |
|
This article is partially complete. This means that all known information is here, but there is still more information that needs to be discovered and/or reverse engineered. If you know some of the missing information, you can help the ModdingWiki by adding this info yourself. |
The Blues Brothers is a side scrolling platform game based on the movie of the same name.
Tools
The following tools are able to work with this game.
| Name | Platform | Group/archives | Levels | Graphics | Music | Sounds | Text | Saves | .exe patch | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Simple level viewer | SDL (Windows) | Read | Read | Read | No | No | No | No | No |
File formats
The following file formats are used by this game.
| Filename | Format | Details |
|---|---|---|
| *.ck1 *.ck2 |
LBM Format | Background tiles, all 320×200 pixels |
| demo?.bin | The Blues Brothers Demo Macro | Demo (uncompressed) |
| *.bin | The Blues Brothers Map Format | Tile attributes (uncompressed), 256 entries 10 bytes long |
| *.sql | The Blues Brothers Map Format | Level data |
| *.sqv | The Blues Brothers Sprite Format | Sprites and foreground tiles |
| *.sqz | LBM Format | Full-screen images (except cga.sqz and vga.sqz) |
Most of the data files are compressed using Titus Interactive SQZ Compression.
Alternative specification: The Blues Brothers Huffman Compression.
Note: the utility UNSQZ.EXE in bb_level_viewer handles both schemes.
cga.sqz and vga.sqz only exist in the FR version of the game, decompressed these are executables so not sure about their usefulness as cgab.exe and vgab.exe are already in this version.
Unused files
Of the other files present in the different versions of the game found on the Internet, there are a couple of them which are simply not part of the game even though they do have the same format/extension.
Versions of the game known so far:
- with 2.EXE (CRC 7ba13688), seems to be US version
- with VGAB.EXE (CRC eae1a21a), seems to be FR version
Cracktro
The files below distributed with cracked versions of the game belong to the TDT / TRSI cracktro Tecno Skull:
| Filename | Format | Details |
|---|---|---|
| intro.com | DOS .COM binary | CRC cfb08d39 |
| john.sqz | MOD Format | Background music (encrypted, see below) |
| oh.sqz | Raw VGA Image | 320×200 skull image |
| terry.sqz | ASCII text (CRLF) | Palette data as space separated decimal numbers: index, red, green, blue |
| pres.sqz | N/A | Mistakenly included in the crack, in fact it is the title image of the game |
The cracktro music is encrypted. The first 3200 bytes are XOR encrypted with the values 0 to 255 repeated, and bytes 3201 to 6401 are XOR encrypted with the value 254. The file can be decrypted with this program:
<syntaxhighlight lang="c">
- include <unistd.h>
- define BLOCK_SIZE 256
- define ENCRYPTED_AMOUNT 6401
int main(int argc, char* argv[]) { char key[BLOCK_SIZE]; char data[BLOCK_SIZE]; int i, n, total, block;
for (i = 0; i < BLOCK_SIZE; i++) key[i] = i;
total = 0; while ((n = read(STDIN_FILENO, data, BLOCK_SIZE))) { if (total < ENCRYPTED_AMOUNT) { for (i = 0; (i < n) && (total + i < ENCRYPTED_AMOUNT); i++) { data[i] = data[i] ^ (total + i <= 3200 ? key[i] : 0xFE); } } write(STDOUT_FILENO, data, n); total += n; }
return 0; } </syntaxhightlight>
Note that the cracktro doesn't decrypt this file in memory, it does so on disk. This is why the last-modified time of john.sqz changes each time the demo is run. If you run the cracktro through an emulator like DOSBox and make a copy of john.sqz after the SoundBlaster question and before the music starts, then you will have a copy of the decrypted music.