DC - Unreleased 'Chakan' & 'Mort the Chicken' files from dev kit HDD

So here we go, as promised in the other thread:
I got my hands on a dev kit with files from what appears to be the unreleased Chakan.



http://uk.dreamcast.ign.com/articles/132/132726p1.html

And I believe there are also parts of a Dreamcast port of the unreleased PS1 game 'Mort the Chicken' on there, too.



http://uk.psx.ign.com/objects/014/014233.html

I did not yet have a very close look at the files, but it seems to me there is nothing really useful in there.

http://pastebin.ca/1297776
http://rapidshare.de/files/41255265/chakandir.txt.html
http://rapidshare.com/files/178805434/chakandir.txt.html
(file list, 17KB)

However, since I was not yet able to get the kit itself running, I did not play around with the recovered files too much.
So if anyone wants to have a closer look at them, get them here:

http://rapidshare.de/files/41256116/erzp0.zip.html
http://rapidshare.com/files/178812348/erzp0.zip.html
http://www.megaupload.com/?d=M83GUYFU
http://uploaded.to/?id=hn94it
http://www.mediafire.com/?sharekey=0d1f403435c45bbad2db6fb9a8902bda
(~92MB, unpacks to ~171MB)

There are also some sample files in there, like a little Sonic demo vid.
Some japanese voice acting (?) is also included, I don't understand one word though.

That's what EasyRecovery outputted in 'advanced' mode.
I also tried the 'raw' recovery, which resulted in ~4 GB in files. Packed as .rar it's still 2.7GB, so it might take a little while to upload.

The recovered filetypes are: ADO, AI, ARJ, AVI, BMP, CDR, CNT, DLL, DOC, EFM, EMF, EPS, EXE, FFX, FRT, GHO, GHS, GIF, HLP, HTM, ICM, IQY, ISU, JPG, LIB, LNK, MID, MOF, MP3, MPG, PCX, PDF, PIF, PSD, QPC, QXD, RAR, RI, RTF, TIF, TLB, URL, WAV, XLS, ZIP.

I have to go through all the files before I upload the entire package though, since I remember seeing some private documents amongst them. If someone can identify any of the above filetypes as DC dev related, I will gladly upload those files separately in the meantime.

Enjoy and: happy new year! :smashed:

 

Thanks a ton for these files. Always wondered what happened to the chakan game. The only problem is that there is some problem with the archive, I keep getting that the archive structure is damaged. Hope to see more of this come out

 

The archive was able to extract correctly for me. You might want to try downloading it again, Rixalis. Sometimes (at least, with IE) a download will stop short of its completion making it appear complete.

I was able to extract additional PVR data from stage4.tpf. The file extension looks like it might stand for "texture package format" since it contains the PVR data and a header with the original file names (not sure about the other data after the name since I haven't looked at it in detail yet, but it's probably the PVR's length, PVR options, etc.).

I'm not 100% sure how Ninja code loads, but there is an example in the official SDK and it compiles to its own binary (as opposed to being loaded by a shell), so I'm guessing the best that can be done with this is to try and maybe make a homebrew version of the game using the assets.

The part that's odd is that the VDS file is outputted by GDWorkshop and it doesn't mention a BIN file. It's been unmodified since the beginning of 2000, so there isn't a BIN file or the developer using the kit back then removed it and for whatever reason, left everything else.

Here is what should be part of it (according to the original layout):

TRACK 1
C\KATANA\R9\LIB\NINJA.LIB
TRACK 2
C\KATANA\R9\LIB\NINJA.LIB
TRACK 3
C\KATANA\R9\LIB\NINJA.LIB
TRACK 4
C\CHAKAN\CHAKAN~2\BALKAR.PMD
C\CHAKAN\CHAKAN~2\JOBBKAR.PMD
C\CHAKAN\CHAKAN~2\LAB.PMD
C\CHAKAN\CHAKAN~2\TORZS.PMD
C\CHAKAN\CHAKAN~1\KARD.PMD
C\CHAKAN\CHAKAN~1\NEGYZET.PMD
C\CHAKAN\CHAKANCD\ARM1.PVR
C\CHAKAN\CHAKANCD\ARM2.PVR
C\CHAKAN\CHAKANCD\ARM3.PVR
C\CHAKAN\CHAKANCD\ARNYEK.PMD
C\CHAKAN\CHAKANCD\ASS.PVR
C\CHAKAN\CHAKANCD\AUDIO64.DRV
C\CHAKAN\CHAKANCD\BACK.PVR
C\CHAKAN\CHAKANCD\BACKGR~1.TPF
C\CHAKAN\CHAKANCD\BACKGR~2.TPF
C\CHAKAN\CHAKANCD\CHAKAN.KAT
C\CHAKAN\CHAKANCD\CHKHAT.PVR
C\CHAKAN\CHAKANCD\CHKTEXT.PVR
C\CHAKAN\CHAKANCD\CLAP.PVR
C\CHAKAN\CHAKANCD\FACE1.PVR
C\CHAKAN\CHAKANCD\FACE2.PVR
C\CHAKAN\CHAKANCD\FOOT1.PVR
C\CHAKAN\CHAKANCD\FOOT2.PVR
C\CHAKAN\CHAKANCD\FOOT3.PVR
C\CHAKAN\CHAKANCD\FRONT.PVR
C\CHAKAN\CHAKANCD\HAT1.PVR
C\CHAKAN\CHAKANCD\HAT2.PVR
C\CHAKAN\CHAKANCD\KALAP.PMD
C\CHAKAN\CHAKANCD\MORT.INI
C\CHAKAN\CHAKANCD\PONYTAIL.PVR
C\CHAKAN\CHAKANCD\SH1.PMD
C\CHAKAN\CHAKANCD\SH2.PMD
C\CHAKAN\CHAKANCD\SH3.PMD
C\CHAKAN\CHAKANCD\SH4.PMD
C\CHAKAN\CHAKANCD\SH5.PMD
C\CHAKAN\CHAKANCD\SH6.PMD
C\CHAKAN\CHAKANCD\SH7.PMD
C\CHAKAN\CHAKANCD\SH8.PMD
C\CHAKAN\CHAKANCD\SH9.PMD
C\CHAKAN\CHAKANCD\SKULL.PVR
C\CHAKAN\CHAKANCD\STAGE2.APF
C\CHAKAN\CHAKANCD\STAGE2.PPF
C\CHAKAN\CHAKANCD\STAGE2.STG
C\CHAKAN\CHAKANCD\STAGE2.TPF
C\CHAKAN\CHAKANCD\SWORD.PVR
C\CHAKAN\CHAKANCD\TALP.PVR
C\CHAKAN\CHAKANCD\THIGH.PVR
C\CHAKAN\CHAKANCD\ZSAK.PVR
C\CHAKAN\KARDASE\BALKARD.PMD
C\CHAKAN\KARDASE\JOBBKARD.PMD
C\CHAKAN\STAGE2\STAGE4.PPF
C\CHAKAN\STAGE2\STAGE4.STG
C\CHAKAN\STAGE2\STAGE4.TPF
C\GYORS\STAGE4.APF

I don't understand why the assets were put on track 4 (CDDA). There isn't even the warning sound or txt files used.

 

A sequel was planned and developed somewhat by Ed Annunziata's studio AndNow, but no new information about the project has been released since 2001. It was planned to be released for as many current platforms as possible, according to Ed Annunziata himself in an interview with SegaFans during May 2001.
Much of the work on the Chakan sequel was later absorbed into the 2002 game Blood Omen 2, as discovered by fans of the series. [1]

 

I read that too, still I think it might be interesting to see how far it got
The whole thing about the missing .bin confused me also, but maybe someone here can piece it all together.
Also, why is there a mort.ini in Chakan?

 

Any chance of a raw dump of the HDD?

Thanks either way. There's stuff on that HDD that'd be lost to the history if you hadn't uploaded it, so you're doing a good thing.

 

I hope so Alchy, I hope so.
The raw dump exists - but I didn't look through all of the files yet.
To me it seems the HDD was also used at a store in Hungary at some time since there are several hardware receipts on there. There are also some (mostly corrupted) .psd files of what seems to be the cover of a book.

Maybe I'll split the dump up and upload filetype by filetype, after going through them of course - but honestly, I think there's nothing else to be found on there, sorry.

 

It looks like the files have the same problem as Ecco II's files. Because they were recovered from reallocated hard drive space, data that wasn't originally part of the file has been written to it. I was trying to create a packager / extracter for the TPF files and noticed in stage4.tpf, it contains parts of other TPF files as well as part of a GDWorkshop file that mentions abstract.txt, etc. At least we were able to see some of the PVRs, etc. Thanks for uploading, Manolo.

 

:banghead:

 

A missing bin file is not all that strange unfortunately. It's the only thing you don't need on the emulated GD since you can load it directly from the hosts disk with the debugger. And if you are switching between different versions of the binary it's a lot more convenient to do it that way.