VGA restoration of the adult camp DOS adventure game Sex Vixens from Space.

HINT: Stuck at the start? Type SPACE to proceed.

Technical Details

The original DOS port of Sex Vixens from Space created RLE-encoded EGA images using the default EGA palette. This was not ideal for representing the... ahem... skin tones that were common in the game. In some cases the screens look fine, but others look very far from ideal.

The Amiga version of the game contains full-color images, conveniently in 320x200 (which is the exact same resolution as VGA's linear mode 13h). The palette for each image (plus the standard 16-color EGA palette) are combined into a new VGA palette. The code for drawing images is replaced with a PCX decoder, but we also add code for things like palette initialization.

For some unknown reason, the game hard-codes the expected sizes for each of the images it loads. We have to patch all those out with our larger images. In addition, some of the new images would overflow the available buffer size so that needs to be patched as well.

Caveats

The patch attempts to reproduce what a VGA port would have looked like. Because the VGA decoding is actually faster than EGA decoding, the patch adds a short sleep after the title screen pops up so the screen is visible.

This has currently been tested on DOSBox, but not real hardware. We're not doing anything too crazy with VGA, so it's likely to work.

Don't expect pretty code. This code is good enough to get things patched, but that's it. It's a hack after all!

Source code for restoration available on github: https://github.com/kudgel/sex-vixens-vgaify

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