Earliest graphical depictions of Rogue-invented monsters

[hathat]

Hi guys,

This could be the right place to ask.
I'm wondering:

Do we have any idea what the original creators imagined that the Rogue-invented monsters look like?
I mean the Aquator, Emu, Ice Monster, Kestrel, Quagga, and Xeroc?

I know the Kestrel is a real bird, and the Quagga is a real kind of horse, but I wonder whether they visualized it as an especially monstrous version... and the same goes for the Emu btw. But I'm of course wondering most about the Aquator, Ice Monster, and Xeroc...

Do there exist screenshots of these from the first graphical version of Rogue?

[elwin]

Here's some screenshots of MacRogue: http://www.benhem.com/aardvark/macRogue/  One of them has an Ice Monster.

The C64 and PC versions had completely different graphics, but I don't know of any screenshots with monsters.

[hathat]

Very interesting!
Epyx's MacRogue is from 1985, so that Ice Monster must be atleast one of the earliest!

From the files at http://rogue.rogueforge.net/
we can see that unix Rogue 5.2 (from 1982) did not yet have the Rogue-specific monsters (it used D&D monsters).
And we can also see that the monsters of unix Rogue 5.3 (from 1983) have now changed into the Rogue-specific ones.

So if Epyx's MacRogue is not the very first graphical version of Rogue (with Rogue-specific monsters), then the first one must have been released in either 1983, 1984, or 1985. (Between unix Rogue 5.3 and MacRogue)

From http://www.lemon64.com/?mainurl=http%3A//www.lemon64.com/games/list.php%3Ftitle%3Drogue
we can see that C64 Rogue was released in 1988, so that's not the first graphical.
I have no idea when the first graphical Rogue for PC was released...

[hathat]

Aha! This guy
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AM07TO699oc
says the Epyx 1985 MacRogue was the first graphical version of Rogue, and furthermore it was made by Michael Toy, one of the two guys who did the very first Rogue. So that should be how they imagined the monsters to look like.

In the MacRogue executable, I've found the following text:

Code: [Select]

aquator        0d0/0d0
bat            1d2
centaur        1d6/1d6
dragon         1d8/1d8/3d10
emu            1d2
venus flytrap  %%%d0
griffin        4d3/3d5/4d3
hobgoblin      1d8
ice monster    1d2
jabberwock     2d12/2d4
kestral        1d4
leprechaun     1d2
medusa         3d4/3d4/2d5
nymph          0d0
orc            1d8
phantom        4d4
quagga         1d2/1d2/1d4
rattlesnake    1d6
slime          1d3
troll          1d8/1d8/2d6
ur-vile        1d3/1d3/1d3/4d6
vampire        1d10
wraith         1d6
xeroc          3d4
yeti           1d6/1d6
zombie         1d8
2d4 1d3 3d4 1d2 1d1 1d1 1d1 2d3 1d6 1d4 4d4 1d2 1d1 1d3 1d1 1d1 1d2 2d5 2d3 1d6

So it seems Michael Toy added a couple more Rogue-specific monsters: the Slime and Ur-vile.
Now we just need to get to the graphics of the monsters - and I expect playing the game in an emulator, and taking screenshots, would not be the way to go, as some monsters are probably not encountered until very deep levels.

So I wonder how to extract the graphics from that old mac executable...
Any ideas?

[elwin]

According to Glenn Wichman's history page, he did the graphics for the Mac version.

Extracting the tiles will be tricky.  They appear to be 18x18 bitmaps.  You would be looking for a block about 1 KB long.  It would be in the global data section but would not contain any text data.  Distinguishing it from all the other data structures might be hard.  It would help to know something about the layout of ancient Mac binaries.

Your best option might be to convert the entire file to a bitmap image and see if any tiles appear amid the random fuzz.

[hathat]

That explains why the game's title screen says "A. I. Design".

I think you're right about converting the entire file to a bitmap.
Preferably one would convert to a 18 pixels wide bitmap (with a 1-18 offset) and then scroll through the entire file (it's only 150K) to spot the graphics.
I've done something similar with success on the C64 once.

Now I'm just hoping there's some software to do that kind of conversion...
Anybody knows about that?

[hathat]

Come to think of it... 18 pixels is a weird width (or height, depending on how the gfx is stored)... It would make sense for such old computers to store 8 monochrome pixels as 1 byte to save space, as I know it is done on the C64. But 18? Would make more sense with 16. And yet the grid in MacRogue is indeed 18 by 18 pixels. The Ice Monster on that screenshot uses 17 by 17 of those pixels.

But I have no idea whether the two-color graphics on such an old Mac system stored one pixel as a bit or a whole byte...

[Tzan]

I played the Atari ST version back then.
On the title screen you'll see "1986".

If you watch, you'll see some monster graphics, including the ice monster.
Not the very first version, but probably the nicest looking version.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yi4VZAR6Elk

[hathat]

Yeah that one looks really nice, and is also made by A. I. Design which, according to
http://www.wichman.org/roguehistory.html
was co-founded by one of the inventors of Rogue (Michael Toy). And as the same source says that the other of the two inventors of Rogue, Glenn Wichman, coded the Atari ST version, the ST-version of the graphics should also be what the inventors imagined the monsters looked like - including what they imagined the colors to be like. (and as the Atari ST had 512 colors, this should not be a limitation).

A good sign: the Ice Monster of the ST version is quite similar to the one in MacRogue.

So now I have another quest, haha: to extract the graphics from the Atari ST Rogue somehow...