Two excellent tutorials have been written by chrrox covering the exploration of archive formats and also how to write QuickBMS scripts to extract them. The first tutorial is a general guide for writing scripts, while the second focuses on using zlib compression. Many users have found them helpful. Overall they are well written, but one thing that could be improved is the formatting.
This year, in 2009, XeNTaX has been around for 20 years! Count ’em! All these years ago, Mr.Ammo and I had been active on the Commodore 64, mainly being lame and hacking other people’s demo’s, as the Unidentified Software Busters (USB). In 1989, we thought it time to do away with all that and start creating our own stuff. Of course, we could not do this as USB, and we founded XeNTaX. A fresh, new group, that would focus on graphics. We created several attempts at demos, Mr.Ammo and I both drawing, while I took up the coder part as well. We soon realised that we needed something more, and I started composing c64 sid tunes (we both played in the same bands already, and I composed some music for that band). Our first music demo was Toxic Waste, featuring 6 of my early tunes and graphics by Mr.Ammo. Toxic Waste was picked up by the German diskmagazine and demogroup Blaze and asked us to join their editorial board of the magazine Addybook, while also joining Blaze as spreader (Mr.Ammo) and musician (Mr.Mouse). We then turned XeNTaX into a C64-music group (in the C64 scene), and had members from all over the world. In 1993, however, XeNTaX stopped the C64 activities and lay low for a while. Some of us did compose some tunes on the Amiga and PC during those years, but it wasn’t until 1997 that activities on the PC started to increase. In 1998 we build our first website, and released stuff for the PC, such as MultiEx Commander, some other small demos, and some PC tunes. In 2001, the first windows version of MultiEx Commander was released and in 2003 we started the Game Research Forum. A few years later, in 2005, the Game File Format Central. Finally, we became an official foundation in 2006.
Now we are here, 20 years later since the first XeNTaX release on the Commodore 64! Happy anniversary to all! Check the Softography page for some of our releases, from the C64 days to 2001.
The MultiEx Commander project originally started on the DOS platform. First there was the commandline tool multiex.exe in 1997, that used the first version of MexScript to process multiple different game resource archives for extraction and updating. MultiEx Commander (1998-1999) was then build as graphical user interface for users. Hence the name, Commander. The last DOS version was 2.3 in 2001 (the first Windows version was 3.0 in 2001). I’ve uploaded most of the relevant files of the DOS version over at the forum here. There you will find the installation files, source code, screenshots and DOCS. For old-time’s sake! Install DOSBox or similar first and then start the installation when in DOSBox mode. It’s quite fun to relive the beginning!
Bogey used MultiEx Commander to create some cool mods for MX vs ATV Unleashed (PC). The mods sport many various improvements, including speeding up the motorcycles and ATVs, making it more difficult to crash, making the physics more advanced, and removing the curse filter on chat. The mods are called Caffeine I, Caffeine II, Caffeine III, and Tweaks, with Caffeine III just being a later version of Caffeine II, etc. Caffeine III includes all features of Tweaks, but in Tweaks there are no changes to the physics. The readme for both is posted here.
Just a blast from the past as we show some scans of MultiEx Commander features in hardcopy magazines. You can read up on what the press though about MultiEx Commander in the past. Either Dutch, from the UK, Belgium or Germany, everybody had something to say. Check the Press page for those!
Rheini has partially translated the German-only game Settlers 2: Rise of Cultures into English, via tools he created to decrypt and encrypt its data files. Currently only the basics have been translated, and anyone can help out by translating more. The data files, including the unencrypted versions, can be found at this topic. Discussion on the tools is here.
We are now hosting the official Jaeder Naub website. Jaeder Naub is an advanced media ripping tool that can find and extract a large number of sounds and graphics from any file that harbours them. It is a stand alone tool, and it is also offered in MultiEx Commander as an optional tool to scan and then select which found media to extract where. Keep browsing to http://www.jaedernaub.com for updates!
The artist called Blue Ninja (NinjaX) has won the XeNTaX Forum Graphics Header compo! Forum visitors voted and the final score was calculated from the total number of points distributed by visitors while taking into account the number of times an entry was the first choice. Blue Ninja just got enough points to win, with 147 points, while Andrei155 got 144 points to take the second place. Steven Gerritse followed with 70 points. Check them out: Winner, Second, Third. Congrats to all winners! Check out all 37 submissions here. There are some really good entries in there!
The vote is on! The Game Research Forum Header contest is now open for voting! Check out all 35+ entries here: http://forum.xentax.com/contest/submissions/index.html . Then hop over to the forum and post your top three!
To celebrate the 5 year anniversary of the Xentax Game Research Forum this year, we are organizing a graphic contest! The idea is to create a new header for the forum that will serve as front from then on! Winner takes $125, second $50 and third $25! Any entry will be considered for rotation at the site, regardless of prize! If you think are up to it, then here’s the requirements:
Conditions:
Deadline: March 15th 2008
Submit you entries to info@xentax.com.
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