Civ 1 ports comparison

[Lord_Hill]

@Blake00 Yeah, at some point this thread sort of morphed into the "lets try and do graphics mods in as many versions as possible" thread, I do intend to return to the original goal of a big old table of differences. The unique PC-98 version was a pleasant surprise indeed compared to the very faithful Mac, Amiga and ST ports. I'm glad I persevered with getting it to run smoothly, it would have been easy to just skip that one due to the challenges of working with DOS in a different language!

Another very obvious difference, the Atari ST version ditches the classic Civ intro music and replaces it with a rather haunting chip tune that makes it sound like I'm about to play a sci-fi themed JRPG or something. Presumably they felt the ST sound hardware wouldn't do the classic tune justice, but I was shocked the first time I fired it up with the sound on.

I didn't create that youtube video btw, just did a quick search for it.

 

[Blake00]

Lol yes I forgot to say that was the other thing I'd usually notice in the Retro Gamer magazine port comparisons.. The Atari ST version would be a copy of the Amiga port but they'd always say it had worse music & sounds.

That sounds quite nice though if you think of it as something from the 8bit era instead of the 16bit era heh. Always love a good chip tune!

 

[Lord_Hill]

The SNES port seems to have been quite popular, as just browsing through the archives of this forum often brings up posts about it. So I'm probably just regurgitating a bunch of stuff people already know, but oh well

@riderr3 ripped the graphics back in 2018
https://forums.civfanatics.com/thre...ilization-1-for-windows.632023/#post-15123138

there's also a nice mod to make the fonts easier to read

Civilization UI & Text Tweaks

This is a small pair of patches for the Super Nintendo version of Sid Meier's Civilization, a t

www.romhacking.net

Some of the more curious differences, instead of the usual text box saying "your civilization has knowledge of road building, irrigation blah blah blah", you get a wacky intro featuring a goddess granting you these powers.

Also as someone pointed out in another thread, mining and terraforming are now separate functions which changes how you manage the tiles ever so slightly.

And like PC-98 you get Japan instead of Zulus. The world map has again been altered to link Japan to the mainland but in a very different way to the PC-98.

 

[Blake00]

Yeah I still hold out hope that someway somehow someone figures out a way to do a SNES graphics mod for CivWin using Riderr3's extractions. The colours would need converting to their nearest matches in CivWin's palette and animation speeds would probably be different, but it would be cool!

Oooh I didn't know about the SNES port darker UI improvement hack. I'll have to get that.

Ahh so they did connect Japan to the mainland in the SNES version to avoid the AI issue, I'd forgotten that.

Wow I continue to be impressed by the PC-98 Civ1 graphics. It's got the higher res of CivWin but the style and colours of CivDos. Would probably make another great terrain mod for CivWin if the PC-98 graphics could be extracted somehow.
.

 

[Lord_Hill]

Yeah, I searched the English speaking pc98 forums for a tool which could handle the graphics but didn't find anything. It's not the same PIC as the DOS version, or perhaps it's just different compression.

Next mission is to test out a crazy snes cheat on some of the cheat sites. Apparently if you give the 4th Russian city a specific name then crazy things happen. There's alot of nonsense on those sites so it's probably fake, but i have to know!

EDIT - as expected, complete rubbish.

 

[Lord_Hill]

Another avenue of research opens up, cheats! CivNet also has a wacky cheat menu listed on the cheat sites and this one is actually real. Move all of your units so the 'end turn' button is flashing, press Ctrl then type aodbamf to add an 'Extras' menu to the menu bar, containing all sorts of mad options.

EDIT - corrected cheat code (you need to press Ctrl first)

 

[Blake00]

Another avenue of research opens up, cheats! CivNet also has a wacky cheat menu listed on the cheat sites and this one is actually real. Move all of your units so the 'end turn' button is flashing then type aodbamf to add an 'Extras' menu to the menu bar, containing all sorts of mad options.
View attachment 654822

Woah you legend! Good find! I actually recently got my hands on a fresh copy of CivNet to have a look at it again and maybe do some stuff with it for my Followup video so a cheats menu will be extra handy!!!

 

[Blake00]

Presenting DOS Tileset Mod for Mac
View attachment 653227

When do you plan to release this mate?

 

[Lord_Hill]

I must admit, I figured there'd be precisely zero demand for such a thing beyond the initial gimmick. I can release it next time I'm in front of the PC if people like.

 

[Blake00]

Well ya never know.. could be a good thing to have around. Plus you've already put the hard work into it.. may as well get it out there!

Another avenue of research opens up, cheats! CivNet also has a wacky cheat menu listed on the cheat sites and this one is actually real. Move all of your units so the 'end turn' button is flashing then type aodbamf to add an 'Extras' menu to the menu bar, containing all sorts of mad options.
View attachment 654822

Hmm I wonder if there's any secret cheat menus in CivWin as well..

 

[Lord_Hill]

DOS Tileset for CivNet attempt one, format is almost identical to CivWin, but clearly the menu colours overlap with the game colours somehow. Delighted with this progress however!

 

[Blake00]

Woah you are having a go at it.. well done!

The change in interface and font colours is very interesting and once again shows that CivNET and Civ2 share engine similarities due to being developed around a similar time. As discussed here and elsewhere, CivNET has a similar cheat menu, it uses a dll image storing system (I'm guessing you're trying one of the dll editing tools I posted in the other thread?), and now I see this happening where certain colours you used have changed the GUI.

Therefore once again I have some information you may find useful. Over the last few years I've been doing experiments with custom font colours in Civ2 after I learned that it's units graphics file override everything else and there were 3 or so palette slots used by the game for fonts so if I swapped out the colours in those precise slots it would change the colours of the titles. Of course I quickly learned that those greys were being used by a lot of background images resulting in me having to switch colours around in plenty of other files too, however CivNET doesn't use image backgrounds (ie it's window backgrounds are blank instead pictures of castles and cities) like Civ2 does thankfully.

To work out the palette slots used for GUI I simply took a picture of Civ2 converted the picture to its main palette, then looked at what palette slots the greys I wanted ot change were sitting in and I either changed them or avoided them. I guess with CivNET it'd be the latter.. there's 1 or 2 greys somewhere that need to stay grey in those slots maybe?

[Civ2] - Civ2 Custom Title/Text/Font Colour Editor?

Hey guys, Across the sites there are so many editors and hack programs for Civilization 2.. map editors, civ editors, city editors, dll gif editors, sound editors etc.. however I haven't been able to find a program that allows you to change text and title colours to better match custom GUI...

forums.civfanatics.com

 

[Lord_Hill]

Thanks @Blake00 , I think you're right. There are extra tiles in the tilesheet compared to CivWin that were easy to put back in (for the stone background stuff), but as you say, certain slots in the palette (I think the first few) are reserved for the GUI colours. I do think this is going to be possible though, just by doing a bit of palette juggling. Also nice bonus, CivMaps (the official map editor) uses the same dll for its graphics. So we have the official editor using DOS graphics too!

 

[Blake00]

Wow that's awesome!

 

[livinginaz]

DOS Tileset for CivNet attempt one, format is almost identical to CivWin, but clearly the menu colours overlap with the game colours somehow. Delighted with this progress however!
View attachment 661298

Fantastic! Will look forward to further progress with great anticipation. The only thing that's a bummer with CivNet is that it plays music from CD only; when I play it in a VM I get no music even with the disc inserted because the VM doesn't see RedBook audio. CivWin doesn't have that problem, though the sound is a lot more glitchy. CivNet is a lot more like Civ II with its quirks than the other versions of Civ I, from what I gather.

 

[Blake00]

Fantastic! Will look forward to further progress with great anticipation. The only thing that's a bummer with CivNet is that it plays music from CD only; when I play it in a VM I get no music even with the disc inserted because the VM doesn't see RedBook audio. CivWin doesn't have that problem, though the sound is a lot more glitchy. CivNet is a lot more like Civ II with its quirks than the other versions of Civ I, from what I gather.

I didn't realise CivNET also used CD music like Civ2 does.. wow yeah that's yet another interesting commonality between them!
Would be interesting to hear how all the music sounds and how it compares to the Roland MT-32 versions of the DOS music tracks that I used to make the CivWIN soundtrack overhaul mod. I'll have to get my hands on the CD at some point.

EDIT: I forgot I had a copy in the depths of my hard drive. Wow.. this is fascinating. It sounds like they did a midi to wav conversion but it's resulted in quite different results to the Roland tracks I used. What's also interesting is that it sounds like they squeezed a few Civ2 tracks in there too.

 

[livinginaz]

I didn't realise CivNET also used CD music like Civ2 does.. wow yeah that's yet another interesting commonality between them!
Would be interesting to hear how all the music sounds and how it compares to the Roland MT-32 versions of the DOS music tracks that I used to make the CivWIN soundtrack overhaul mod. I'll have to get my hands on the CD at some point.

EDIT: I forgot I had a copy in the depth of my hard drive. Wow.. this is fascinating. It sounds like they did a midi to wav conversion but it's resulted in quite different results to the Roland tracks I used. What's also interesting is that it sounds like they squeezed a few Civ2 tracks in there too.

To my ears they sound different enough that I think they redid the tracks from scratch, for example the Babylonian one is much longer than the short Roland Mt one. It is possible that they were done based on the MIDI files but with a different Roland soundfont. Recently I discovered that if you use DosBox with a Roland MT-32, even WITHOUT emulating it, you will get sound in a much different soundfont than the MT-32 usually has. For Civ this produces varying results, some tracks are very neat (like electric guitar riffs in the menu opening, or the Roman theme done on a piano) and others sound totally off and plainly weak. It's very interesting. Back when I played Civ I for the first time it was on the basic PC Speaker setting that was just an arrangement of beeps and blips; I did not realize just how many variations of these tunes it is possible to hear.

 

[Lord_Hill]

It's very much Civ 1.5 isn't it? Never really given it time of day before now. Not quite ready to replace civwin for me yet even with the mod. No save editing / scenarios and no play past retirement are still deal breakers, but it's fun to mess with. Particularly hd resolution with zoom.

 

[Lord_Hill]

CivNet is an absolute pig for reusing the palette for GUI colours. Here are the slots I've identified so far. The minimap at the very least has hard coded colours for every terrain type and all the advisor windows have hard coded colours as well. It's not going to be perfect, some GUI backgrounds are going to have to be a 'closest match' kind of thing, but we're getting there.

Colour Pal Index Hex code Usage
2 404040 Window borders right/bottom
5 9f9f9f Window fills / minimap mountain
6 bfbfbf Window borders top/left
7 9c9a04 Window border select civ
8 ffffff In game text status bar
9 ffff51 In game text cities / main window etc (+ box around minimap)
10 ffe43d End turn colour
18 018001 Minimap jungle
34 2a4da9 Minimap water
38 6f6df0 Title screen text
41 d3d3ff Minimap tundra
53 c6a329 Minimap desert
56 1ab2b3 Palace background
58 708914 Minimap grassland

EDIT - updated with a few more values

 

[Blake00]

Wow well done, you're getting close!