Alice Averlong🏳️‍⚧️Sep 28, 2023

I love the 1990-ass design of Railroad Tycoon's save system.
not "which directory do you want to save your game?", but "which drive has your save game disk?"

You know, cause you'd put the game in drive A:, and if you were fancy, you'd save to a blank disk in drive B:

Too poor to have two drives? Gotta swap them to save, then swap back to keep playing.

Show threadAlice Averlong🏳️‍⚧️Sep 28, 2023
okay, now that's interesting. So, backstory info:
Railroad Tycoon (1990) stores most images as .PIC files. The format is unknown but seems to start with either 06, 07, 0F, then a 00, then the width and height as uint16s. You can do the VN-trick to decode them: rename your target file to one of the ones the game shows at startup, and it'll display it for you. (credits2.pic, for example)
Show threadAlice Averlong🏳️‍⚧️Sep 28, 2023

now when you save your game, it saves two files: RR1.SVE and RR1.MAP.
(The 1 can be 0-5 depending on which slot you save into/if it's an autosave).

Now the obvious guess is that the game saves things like "how much money you have" and "where your trains are" in the .SVE, and the current state of the map in the .MAP file, since the game world dynamically changes over time.

Show threadAlice Averlong🏳️‍⚧️Sep 28, 2023
Here's the weird part: The .MAP file? It's actually a PIC!
Show threadAlice Averlong🏳️‍⚧️Sep 28, 2023
I started a game in Western-US and saved my game after making a quick railroad, and then renamed my RR1.MAP to CREDITS2.PIC and started the game. This is what I got:
Show threadAlice Averlong🏳️‍⚧️Sep 28, 2023

now that's super interesting because PIC files are compressed!

And the game can SAVE them, not just load them! that's unusual for games of this age!

Show threadAlice Averlong🏳️‍⚧️Sep 28, 2023
interestingly the images in the MAP files are set to 320x200 (like all the other images), even though they're clearly actually 256x192. I guess it was easier to write a compressor/decompressor that just assumes 320x200.
Show threadAlice Averlong🏳️‍⚧️Sep 28, 2023
anyway this also lets me do something I've always kinda wondered about but can finally tell for sure:
Yep, the game is dynamically generating the maps when you start, not just animating them fancy. Here's two starts of a Western-US map:
Show threadjoelhaddock
@foone This was one of my favorite games at the time and I had absolutely no idea the maps were different each time!
Sep 28, 2023 at 11:52pmWeb