First post, by Hammer
(Paging Gulikoza) 😀
As most of you probably know, there was an add-on MPEG decoder board sold back in the day under the name Reelmagic/Realmagic.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RealMagic
The games that supported this board had a separate version released called the "MPEG version" rather than the same piece of software supporting both the hardware acceleration and the non-hardware accelerated version. the Realmagic versions look for the hardware and try to make some calls to it to render the movies.
I've acquired MPEG versions of two games:
1) Conspiracy by Cryo (AKA KGB). In the non-MPEG CD version, Donald Sutherland's character speaks to you in the worst example of full-screen FMV I've ever seen - terrible resolution. I haven't been able to get the MPEG version to play, but it has standard MPEG videos that look much better.
2) Return to Zork - there is FMV in this game in a few places, including the tele-orb with the wizard inside. In the non-MPEG CD version, you get video for the first few times the wizard speaks to you, and then he turns into a still image. With the MPEG version, I believe all of the wizard's dialog is video.
Question - can anyone help to get the MPEG version of these games working on modern computers without the need for special hardware?
Thanks in advance for reading this.