Putty Squad is finally seeing release!

[Harrison]

Indeed. A copy must exist somewhere...

It is also interesting to read that the assets for the original first game no longer exist. It always amazes me how many developers lose the original assets for games, and the same is true for every media across the board. I remember a few years ago having to work on a web campaign, disassembling a flash movie .fla file to extract the assets back out to use in the rest of its associated campaign, because the original designers/developers no longer had the assets. Mad! I suppose you can understand the assets of a 20+ year old game not surviving though.

[Yanni Oblivion]

Yeah I know the feeling, for that reason I've started to organise my files better and burn anything I'm not going to use for potentially years to DVD.

There must be a way to rip the assets from the Amiga version, but to do that would probably require a program written for Amiga use (if only via emulation). Having said that, I just found this site with some of the game assets on it...

http://puttymoon.predseda.com/downloads.htm

[Harrison]

Nice find. I noticed the people creating that site are well known in the Amiga community. Especially "Chain".

As for stripping game assets. There are quite a few tools for doing this in the Amiga scene. The demo scene groups were especially good at creating tools for this, as they often asset stripped content from games to use in the demos. These tools can normally extract the sprites, mod music files and other graphics from the game code. It would be cool to create a thread to explore these tools and see how well they work.

[Yanni Oblivion]

I can't access this site from my home as the uni is the ISP and they have decided in their ultimate wisdom to block most ports, but this was in my bookmarks as containing a lot of ripped music from Amiga games:

http://fonix.dyndns.org:40000/soamc/

As for ripping the graphics, I'll have to look into that myself in a few days time when I have some spare time to tackle it. I don't know really anything about the way the Amiga handled file formats and such, but would I be correct to assume that the GFX would have been stored (at least when uncompressed) as some kind of IFF file?

[Harrison]

IFF files are the most likely image format for the Amiga, and you can use some PC utilities such as XnView which can read then out of the box, or IRFanView which has a plugin.

Some image files such as sprites might however be in unique file formats developed by specific developers for their own projects and be unique to them. Maybe to create a special compression for their files, or a different way of storing them on the disks. Rippers were often created to extract and convert specific developers file formats when they were unique.

[Yanni Oblivion]

Could you point myself in the direction of some of these rippers?

[Harrison]

Most rippers were released by and included on demoscene release disks. PG or Teho might be better at helping you locate them. If not I will post some info for you when i get chance.