In the recent past we have seen recreations of a couple of CD-i titles, made by the CD-i Community. One the one hand because chances that an official company will ever remaster/recreate these CD-i games are very small/unlikely. On the other hand because current emulation efforts are still not perfect. In 2019, we uncovered the PC version of 'The Apprentice', made by CD-i member Shikotei. In 2020, CD-i member Dopply released his remastered versions of 'Link: Face of Evil' and its twin release 'Zelda: Wand of Gamelon'. What kind of tools were used to extract the original assets when making the remasters?
Dopply: "The assets had long been ripped by the community before I started on the project in 2016, so that wasn't necessary. I believe there were special tools developed to rip the cutscenes, however. The sprite art was ripped like any other game, by hand in an emulator, though, but again, all before I got to it. I just coded the engine, rebalanced the gameplay, and implemented everything."
So you programmed in all the platform locations yourself, or how does that work? "Yep, I laid out the level collision by hand, based on playing the game, video reference, play testing, and 'what looked and felt right'."
"That's basically the same approach that Shikotei took for his remake of The Apprentice for the PC. Except that he also had to decode all the audio, sprites and graphics from the disc image (it wasn't done before he started) and in fact his remake does it on the fly just before starting each level so that it never gets stored anywhere.", according to cdifan.
[Thanks, Shikotei, Dopply, cdifan, TWBurn]
