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Versions of Mortal Kombat (1) (DOS port)

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Reply 80 of 93, by Tenka

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Ok, I timed as you said and the GOG Dos port indeed came to 55 seconds on the dot for the total round time. I dont have access to any other versions, so I proceeded out of curiousity to check the Rev 3.0 Arcade I had been running. Guess what? ... 60, exactly.

Edit: Also in case anyones interested, 5.0 and 4.0 also came to 60 seconds in the round as well.

So it seems like the Floppy version is as fast as the legit arcade, but the CD version is in fact faster!

I'll need to talk it over with the guys to see if this is evidence enough to proceed, but if you compared the CD to the other Dos ports and the CD version is faster than all others, then I think its safe to say that the dosbox emulation is running at the appropriate speed. The CD version of Dos MK is just faster than the actual arcade!

Well I hope that fact was a fun contribution. Thanks so much for your help, I'll come back here if we need any further investigation.

Reply 82 of 93, by Tenka

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badmojo wrote:

Very interesting thanks Tenka! Please post a link to your DOS speed run once complete.

Hey! Sorry I missed your response.

I wound up acquiring and running 3 of the different versions (CD, Virgin, and Ultratech v2) .. We decided to create separate subcategories for each, since the differences in speed would make it unfair to run them in the same category.

Here are the links to the 3 Runs:

Ultratech (9:31)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-mNZ0w4yx2c&t=177s

Virgin (9:47)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4anSWmDQ7Ag&t=162s

CD (9:18)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AesVD2S9azQ&t=308s

I can certainly do much better than this in all 3 (on Arcade I have a time of 8:20), but since the category is pretty uncontested I settled for those times for now. Maybe give someone else a chance to enter the competition 😜.

Reply 83 of 93, by badmojo

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Awesome! I've long considered myself pretty good at MK but as always I have a lot to learn 🤣 For example the jump punch - I don't use these nearly enough apparently!

Life? Don't talk to me about life.

Reply 84 of 93, by Tenka

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badmojo wrote:

Awesome! I've long considered myself pretty good at MK but as always I have a lot to learn 🤣 For example the jump punch - I don't use these nearly enough apparently!

The jump punch strat only works with Johnny Cage (and I think Rayden, but I havent really investigated yet). Something about the hit-box's for the Jump Punch animation actually causes them to interrupt the "cheat neutral jump kick" that the AI does as opposed to being cancelled by it. If you attempted the same thing with Scorpion/Sub Zero/ Sonya/ Lui Kang etc .. you cant get through and you just get eaten.

Reply 86 of 93, by Stretch

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I noticed the roland.drv file has MT-32 Sysex commands when viewed in a hex editor. I couldn't find the MIDI files, however. Has anyone had any luck extracting the MIDI files?

ROLAND.DRV MT-32 Sysex

F0 41 10 16 12 (351 occurences)

Patch Temp
F0 41 10 16 12 03 (93 occurences)

Patch Memory
F0 41 10 16 12 05 (128 occurences)

Timbre Memory
F0 41 10 16 12 08 (128 occurences)

System
F0 41 10 16 12 10 (2 occurences)

Win 11 - Intel i7-1360p - 32 GB - Intel Iris Xe - Sound BlasterX G5

Reply 87 of 93, by Stretch

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I found Reverse engineering Mortal Kombat GRA file format (part 1) and Reverse engineering Mortal Kombat GRA file format (part 2) which discusses the GRA graphics files from MK1, which the author has reverse engineered. The author released a viewer tool several months ago on Github here rewolf-mortal-kombat-viewer

I own both the Ultratech and GOG MK1 game, and I do see binary differences between several GRA files with a diff tool.

I will try rewolf-mortal-kombat-viewer over the weekend to see if I can spot some graphical differences between the releases.

A separate tool has been released by a different author which focuses on de-compiling the CD version of MK1 as well as other MS-DOS games that were built by Watcom.

Watcom Decompilation Tool (wcdctool)

Win 11 - Intel i7-1360p - 32 GB - Intel Iris Xe - Sound BlasterX G5

Reply 88 of 93, by Stretch

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I found that Lemmings 2 accepts the Mortal Kombat 1 UltraTech/GOG Adlib and Roland drivers, as long as the drivers have their file extension renamed to BIN.

In the Lemmings 2 music folder, just remove the old adlib.bin and roland.bin and copy over adlib.drv and roland.drv and rename the file ext. I also disabled sfx in setup.

In L2, the MK1 Adlib music tempo is sped up, whereas the MK1 Roland music tempo is correct.

I didn't play too much yet but it seems like all the levels in each world will play the same song, so these are the worlds that have their own tune (iow play the 1st level of each world):

Beach
Outdoor
Egyptian
Medieval
Classic
Circus
Highland
Polar
Cavelems
Shadow

Win 11 - Intel i7-1360p - 32 GB - Intel Iris Xe - Sound BlasterX G5

Reply 89 of 93, by pepodmc3

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Nyerguds2 wrote on 2017-07-25, 07:00:
The MK1 Sega CD tracks seem to very often be cut off at the start. Not sur if that's just a playback issue on PC or really like […]
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95DosBox wrote:

However as for recording of the best Mortal Kombat sound samples I must say if you want to remain true to the actual game I would use the MAME and record the MK1 audio from the game directly instead. I also have the MK CD if I wanted the purest sound.

The MK1 Sega CD tracks seem to very often be cut off at the start. Not sur if that's just a playback issue on PC or really like that on the disc, but since those are bare CD audio tracks, I suspect the latter. Notably, some of the gong sounds are cut off, whereas the (lower quality) wav files in the PC CD version have them completely. There are also a lot of tracks simply missing; a CD can only hold so many audio tracks.

I haven't experimented on with the sound replacement, but I did find out there are limits to the size that the game can handle. May just be memory limit; maybe it really can't allocate more. The fact it seems to actually preload the entire files is definitely bad design on the developers' side, though 😜

If it's just the game running out of memory, then maybe giving DOSBox more memory might solve it, but I don't know what kind of memory management MK1 uses, and how much mem it is actually capable of addressing. Though DOS games usually do claim all they are given, so that's a plus.

By the way, talking about the midi/floppy version... I made this silly little add-on for the GOG version:
MK1 floppy (midi) version for GOG install 😉

Hello. Thanks a lot for the tool to extend the size of the tracks.
Im making a music mod putting the sega genesis soundtrack into this version of the game (i like the genesis ost more). And i was having a strange noise bug after adding the "finish round" tracks of each stage, but with your tool that problem is fixed.

But there is one problem, not with your tool, but with how the game put the order of some tracks.

I was not very familiar with the arcade ost and the arcade/msdos cd version of the game. And i noticed that the music track of "Throne Room" stage (plus "Throne Room" finish round track when you finish the round) is reused for "Pit bottom" stage and for the first time you fight in "goros lair" (before the endurances)

Im putting the tracks in the same order as in the sega genesis version, so , the sega genesis version of "Throne Room" feels off in "pit bottom" and "goros lair" stages

The favor i want to ask you (please) is if you can find a way to make the game use "goros lair" track (plus "goros lair finish round" track when finish a round) instead of "Throne Room" track for those 2 stages.

Reply 90 of 93, by Nyerguds2

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pepodmc3 wrote on 2021-08-23, 16:58:

The favor i want to ask you (please) is if you can find a way to make the game use "goros lair" track (plus "goros lair finish round" track when finish a round) instead of "Throne Room" track for those 2 stages.

Oof. Glad the tool was useful to you, but all I did was find the files tables with the sizes it uses. To actually see where they're used, that'd require a lot deeper hacking than what I did 😐

Expert on all things Command & Conquer 1 related, creator of the C&C95 v1.06 patch, contributor and tester on the official C&C Remastered project.
(Ignore the '2' in the name 😩)

Reply 91 of 93, by pepodmc3

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Nyerguds2 wrote on 2021-08-23, 17:57:
pepodmc3 wrote on 2021-08-23, 16:58:

The favor i want to ask you (please) is if you can find a way to make the game use "goros lair" track (plus "goros lair finish round" track when finish a round) instead of "Throne Room" track for those 2 stages.

Oof. Glad the tool was useful to you, but all I did was find the files tables with the sizes it uses. To actually see where they're used, that'd require a lot deeper hacking than what I did 😐

ok. thanks for answer

Reply 92 of 93, by JulesRoland

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Woah Necromancer + 10!!!

Sorry but I was thinking... is there a way to slow down the MK CD version, to behave like Ultratech V2 (final) 586,311 ?
It would be nice to have a mkcd version with the arcade speed, since it does have all the sound effects, no sound bugs, maybe we can put back the midi music too
I was fumbling with the GRA viewer too and I thought that maybe it would be a cool project to have a definitive DOS version

Reply 93 of 93, by Nyerguds2

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Can't you just underclock DOSBox cycles to get that effect? :p

Expert on all things Command & Conquer 1 related, creator of the C&C95 v1.06 patch, contributor and tester on the official C&C Remastered project.
(Ignore the '2' in the name 😩)