The Lost Vikings/Blackthorne Tools

About

Blackthorne is a 1994 cinematic platformer by Blizzard Entertainment for the SNES and MS-DOS. The Lost Vikings is a 1993 puzzle-platformer by Silicon & Synapse (later Blizzard) in which three vikings with different abilities cooperate to complete each level. This is a public-domain library and set of command-line tools (pack_tool, sprite_view, tileset_view, level_view, and a virtual-machine disassembler/compiler for The Lost Vikings) built from a partial reverse-engineering of the DOS data formats used by The Lost Vikings and Blackthorne. It doesn't reimplement either game — it's for extracting, viewing, and decompiling their original data files — and has only been tested on Linux.

Getting started

Run each tool with --help for its command-line options. The level viewer, for example, takes a path to the extracted DATA.DAT file and a level number; arrow keys pan the view, and F/B/O/G/R toggle foreground tiles, background tiles, objects, the grid, and object bounding boxes.

Known limitations

• rendering: Many sprites are rendered incorrectly or not at all in the level viewer due to unclear sprite set selection and palette handling.
• rendering: Packed 32x32 object sprites are not drawn; the game's sprite set selection mechanism is not fully understood.
• rendering: Blackthorne levels often do not render correctly; parts of the map appear to be folded and secondary tile maps for backgrounds are not supported.
• rendering: Palette animations are decoded but not fully understood or supported.

Additional notes

License

The tools themselves are public domain, though they operate on copyrighted DATA.DAT files from the original commercial games.