Civ 1 ports comparison

[Lord_Hill]

There was a question in a previous thread 'what is the last release of Civ 1' which got me thinking, we all know about the various graphical and UI changes that the console and home PC ports made, but has anyone ever had a look at the underlying mechanics? So I'm thinking of things like:
-whether the DOS v1 or v3 happiness model is used
-whether the 'all units get their turns back if you save in the middle of a turn' bug is present,
-can you play on past retirement

The ports I've got working so far are DOS (of course), Windows, Mac (256 colour, didn't bother with black & white), Amiga ECS (but not AGA), Atari ST, PC-98, SNES, PSX, Saturn and CivNet, which is pretty much all of them.

I'm also interested in patch versions and what changed. Mac certainly had a few patches, as did Amiga (at the very least there's the ECS version that most people had and the fancy full colour AGA version).

The general strategy will be to play each port, probably using a despotic chariot rush strategy plus lots of cities to try and force some very unhappy citizens to show up. Of course, if you're a die hard SNES or PC-98 fan and you know the answer to some of these questions, please chime in! I'll post here from time to time as to how I'm getting on.

 

[Lord_Hill]

Here's a cool thing, the readme for CivWin mentions that you can use the saves in the Mac version by just copying them over then using the Mac software 'ResEdit' to give the file the right owner/permissions. And, it works! So thanks to this and JCivEd you can go DOS-->Win-->Mac (and back again) if you like.

 

[darkpanda]

Here's a cool thing, the readme for CivWin mentions that you can use the saves in the Mac version by just copying them over then using the Mac software 'ResEdit' to give the file the right owner/permissions. And, it works! So thanks to this and JCivEd you can go DOS-->Win-->Mac (and back again) if you like.
View attachment 652583

Since JCivEd is written in pure Java, it should be able to run natively on Mac... Maybe not on "vintage" Macs though

 

[Lord_Hill]

@darkpanda yeah, this is running on an old school 68k Mac via the Basilisk emulator, apparently even the power pc macs had trouble running the game (they required a fan made hack "CivHack" to get the game to start), let alone the modern Intel and ARM models.

And more proof that the Mac and Windows save format is identical, I copied a Mac save to windows, gave it the SAV file extension and JCivEd opened it just fine.

 

[Lord_Hill]

PC98 Civ is a curious beast, like a cross between DOS and SNES, although leaning closer to DOS with the interface being basically the same. The higher resolution means you get prettier tiles. Even without knowing a single word of Japanese, I'm blundering my way through a game just through the interface being so close to DOS. Although the tech tree is just random guesses, no little pictures to help there. Also I'm sure I attacked a fortified stack not in a city or fortress and only destroyed a single unit instead of the whole stack. Need to try and make that happen again and see if it's a fluke.

 

[Lord_Hill]

Top tip for playing Civ in a language you're not fluent in, right clicking on any production item or scientific advance will bring up the civilopedia page, which for units, normal buildings and advances, has little pictures to help out. Can't believe I forgot about that, it's been a while since I've needed that functionality to be fair No such help with the wonders sadly, just text for those.

So far I've found no differences besides the odd stack defence behaviour (which does seem to be always present), and the find a city option is not present in the menu. You can Escape to rename your Civ, Alt+R to randomise leader traits works and unsurprisingly, the Shift+56 cheat does not work.

I don't have an advanced enough game to see what happens with very unhappy citizens or retirement yet. Does anyone know if there's an easier in-game way to spot patch 3 or above behaviour other than the happiness model? Are there any other more obvious changes I can look for?

Here's Japan's diplomacy portrait. As is well known, Japan replaces the Zulus in this version.

 

[Mize]

Does anyone know if there's an easier in-game way to spot patch 3 or above behaviour other than the happiness model?

In version .01 transports cause unhappiness, IIRC.

 

[darkpanda]

Here's Japan's diplomacy portrait. As is well known, Japan replaces the Zulus in this version.
View attachment 653016

Had never heard of this japanese PC98 version, and I must say I'm astonished... What's the easiest way to get it ?

 

[Quintillus]

lurker's comment: This is a cool comparison project, it sounds like you really have a lot of different ports of Civ assembled! I love articles doing these sorts of "how did programs compare on different systems back in the 80s/early 90s" comparisons.

I don't suppose it's possible to use a PC or Mac save on PC-98, or vice versa? I joined the Civ party a bit late for Civ1, but along with the graphical differences the save compatibility is an aspect that's really interesting to me.

It will be cool to see how the rest of the ports compare!

 

[Lord_Hill]

Thanks @Quintillus , yes I have quite the eccentric collection of emulators setup right now, it was quite the effort to get them all running smoothly! PC-98 superficially uses the same sve/map split format as DOS, but the saves aren't compatible, I tried. You'd think they must be pretty close given how similar everything is, but I'm no expert on reverse engineering compression formats, that's for sure. I'd love to get at the graphics and do a windows conversion mod as well, but again it's not using the same PIC format as DOS. I'll have to trawl through the PC-98 forums and see if anyone has made any tools.

 

[Quintillus]

Thanks @Quintillus , yes I have quite the eccentric collection of emulators setup right now, it was quite the effort to get them all running smoothly! PC-98 superficially uses the same sve/map split format as DOS, but the saves aren't compatible, I tried. You'd think they must be pretty close given how similar everything is, but I'm no expert on reverse engineering compression formats, that's for sure. I'd love to get at the graphics and do a windows conversion mod as well, but again it's not using the same PIC format as DOS. I'll have to trawl through the PC-98 forums and see if anyone has made any tools.

Fascinating. I hadn't thought about different compression, but I suppose it makes sense that if two different systems have different compression libraries available, they'd wind up with different compression. I was expecting maybe something like the different bit width of integers (8 vs 16 vs 32) might surface at some point too, particularly on the less powerful platforms.

Also interesting that the PIC format is not the same. It's a different time than today, when a JPG is a JPG and a PNG is a PNG and you can reliably count on them being readable cross-platform.

 

[Lord_Hill]

The Amiga AGA (high colour) version is famously open in the sense that all the graphics use the popular LBM format which was used for many years on Amiga and other home computers. Just decompress the files you want to modify, I used this really nice command line utility recommended on the Amiga forums.

GitHub - temisu/ancient: Decompression routines for ancient formats

Decompression routines for ancient formats. Contribute to temisu/ancient development by creating an account on GitHub.

github.com

Then just open up the LBM file in your graphics editor of choice. IrfanView works provided that you download the additional 'Formats.dll' plugin from the IrfanView website. Port of @Vaximillian units and terrain to Amiga anyone?

@Quintillus how's this for save file incompatibility. You can't even share saves between the Amiga ECS (low colour) and Amiga AGA (high colour) versions. The save format is... you guessed it SVE & MAP, but a different SVE/MAP from DOS and PC-98.

 

[darkpanda]

@Quintillus how's this for save file incompatibility. You can't even share saves between the Amiga ECS (low colour) and Amiga AGA (high colour) versions. The save format is... you guessed it SVE & MAP, but a different SVE/MAP from DOS and PC-98.

If it's really all only SVE and MAP, it shouldn't be too hard to convert from one to the other...

 

[Lord_Hill]

Atari ST Civ is also using uncompressed LBM files for its graphics, they can be open in IrfanView in the same way as above. Perhaps suggesting this is a spin off of Amiga AGA?

 

[Lord_Hill]

@darkpanda I'm sure you're right, in particular Amiga OCS, Amiga AGA and Atari ST saves all can be opened in each of the 3 versions, but with corrupted graphics. You can even move units around over the corrupted background. Perhaps suggesting the SVE bit is identical, but how the map tiles are being stored is ever so slightly different in each game.

EDIT - yeah, it's definitely the map file. To prove this I made 3 Earth map saves on the first turn on each of the 3 games. And by chopping and changing which map file I load with an sve, I can load any sve on any version. The sve files are all the same size, the map files are all different sizes.

 

[Quintillus]

I am not shocked about the minor differences in the map format between the Amiga versions and the Atari version. Nowadays we think of, "a format is a format", but many formats have different variations. I'm reminded of the humble BMP format. It's simple, right? A little bit of header information, and then 3 bits per pixel. But there are actually quite a few variants. Indexed bitmaps, bit depth settings, RLE compression, different headers whose lengths vary. I've seen certain variants of OS/2 bitmaps that don't render quite right on Windows due to header differences, because of small differences in the headers, and if you try to load an indexed bitmap on a program that isn't aware of them, it's not going to make any sense of it.

darkpanda would be able to make a better guess than I would about the most likely difference in this case. Though I agree about the statement that (in theory) it probably is a relatively minor difference between the versions.

 

[Lord_Hill]

Civ for Mac is so close to the Windows port than Honza's mod tools partially work on the archive files. If you use CiderPress to extract the resource files from the four disks called Civ Data 1, 2, 3, 4, Sounds and BW (for black and white mode) onto a Windows machine, make sure you have the setting 'extract resource forks' enabled, then rename those files (specifically the resource fork files) to have an RSC extension, Honza's tools can extract the graphics which are in the same GIF format as the windows version. The 256 colour graphics are literally identical, but here are some of the unique to Mac black and white graphics.

 

[Lord_Hill]

Presenting DOS Tileset Mod for Mac

 

[Lord_Hill]

Curiously, the contents of CIVDATA0.RSC on the windows version (the civilopedia text and Earth map) are stuffed within the EXE itself, so if you want a custom Earth map in this version, you'd need to do some hex editing.

 

[Blake00]

Wow that PC98 version with the high res graphics is pretty cool! I'd never seen that version before!

And yes I love those retro game version comparisons too. Retro Gamer magazine is filled with them every month and in most cases they usually say that the Atari ST version is a copy of the Amiga port of said game.

Wow nice work on the DOS graphics for MAC version. Very cool. I'll have to make a note to mention that in my eventual Civ1 followup video.
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