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Hopper262 / marathon-utils

Perl scripts to read and write Marathon / Aleph One Shapes and other data files.
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Request for Assistance in Using Perl Scripts #3

Open ribbybbir opened 2 months ago

ribbybbir commented 2 months ago

I want to use the Marathon1 to AlephOne conversion scripts so I can start editing mods. In addition, there are plenty of programs and old mods in default Macintosh/Apple based file formats. I cannot access these formats (reference: https://lochnits.com/marathon/scenarios/).

First off, I would like to convert the Marathon1 format of the Trojan scenario. Sure, there is actually a Windows based Marathon2 conversion, but with virustotal.com malware scan services, I do not want to risk the bitcoin malware infection.

Below are the links to the older Trojan scenario conversions. Use discretion with these links. http://bighouse.bungie.org/tm2/download.html http://bighouse.bungie.org/trojan/bungieorg.html

Hopper262 commented 1 month ago

Trojan for Marathon 1 has been repackaged for use with Aleph One:

https://simplici7y.com/items/marathon-trojan/

Aleph One reads Marathon 1 files natively, so they do not have to be converted, just unpacked from the original Macintosh archive formats. One big hurdle is that most mods (Trojan included) use installer programs that only run on classic Macs. In my own experience, I usually have to run these programs in an emulator like SheepShaver or Infinite Mac to extract the files needed for Aleph One. With an emulator, you can also directly edit Marathon 1 mods using old Mac tools, since modern editors only support M2-style scenarios.

The scripts here only help with a small part of porting a Marathon 1 scenario to Marathon 2. You can convert a Marathon 1 shapes file to Marathon 2 format, and view/edit it in ShapeFusion, but I don't have a tool to turn it back into a Marathon 1 shapes file. Aleph One makes certain assumptions about the shapes based on their file format, so things like the HUD would break (and Aleph One would probably crash) if the converted file were used without additional editing.

To convert Marathon 1 maps to Marathon 2, the only way I know is to load each level in Aleph One, export it with the ".save" Lua command, and then edit with Weland. I think this process will preserve the Marathon 1-specific behavior of a map when used in Aleph One.

To deal with Macintosh file formats, using an emulator is often the easiest way, but the unar command-line tool will handle some classic Mac formats like Stuffit, and my classic-mac-utils scripts will allow you to extract some common image and string resources.

I hope this helps you to find useful resources. Unfortunately I have very limited time to provide help, but if you have a specific question, I will try to answer when I can.