Quake: Arcade Tournament Edition gets decrypted!

[taufan99]

Some of you who have tried it on MAME may remember how it's unplayable due to a missing physical copy protection dongle.

Fortunately enough, a Github user under the name mills5 has decrypted it and uploaded the result sometime ago, which you can check here.

Of course you still need the quakeat.chd, since providing the file as-is with the decrypted program/code is illegal.

 

Here's the README.md for those curious.

Quote

quakeat-decrypted

Quake Arcade Tournament Edition, with dongle protection removed.

 

What is this?

Quake Arcade Tournament Edition (quakeat) is an unreleased prototype arcade port of Quake 1. It has several unique engine modifications and cannot run in a source port.

You can read more about it here:

http://quakearcadetournament.blogspot.com/

https://www.quaddicted.com/quake/quake_arcade_tournament_edition

https://www.tweaktown.com/news/36841/rare-quake-arcade-tournament-edition-on-ebay-1-of-20-/index.html

You can obtain a copy of the port by searching for its MAME hard disk image, quakeat.chd.

Previously, quakeat was unplayable on home computers due to a missing physical copy protection dongle that would normally be plugged into the arcade machine. Attempting to run glquake.exe would result in a Security key not found error.

This modified executable removes the dongle protection, so the port can be played on home computers.

 

Instructions

• Download glquake_decrypted.exe, and place it in the game's root directory.
• Run glquake_decrypted.exe. The -nogci option is recommended.
• If you encounter crashes or freezes, try:

1. Using a Glide wrapper. nGlide worked for me on Windows 10. Specifically, ensure the glide.dll, glide2x.dll, and glide3x.dll files are alongside quake_decrypted.exe.
2. Running the executable with the -nogci, -nosound, or -window options.
3. Opening ID1/quake.rc and commenting out all lines where a .avi file is passed as a parameter to startdemos, i.e. change startdemos avis\lbe.avi to //startdemos avis\lbe.avi, startdemos avis\q3d-msv.avi to //startdemos avis\q3d-msv.avi... (issue)

 

FAQ

Q: Why is glquake_decrypted.exe different than what is produced by quakeat_patcher.c?

A: glquake_decrypted.exe was dumped with Scylla. The patcher was written after the fact, and works slightly differently – it modifies the original program to automagically decrypt itself and load imports when run.

 

Special thanks to

CyberHeg - "Breaking the shell", March 2001. http://www.woodmann.com/crackz/Tutorials/Cyberheg4.htm

ShubNigurrath of ARTeam - "Removing Sentinel SuperPro dongle from Applications", September 2006 (pdf)

 

Gameplay videos:

E1M1

DM7

 

Edited August 14, 2020 by InDOOMnesia

[unerxai]

That's mindblowing. I didn't know this arcade even existed.

 

The different secrets in E1M1 make me curious. Maybe they wanted the maps to be more linear to make the gameplay more arcadey? The enemies are pushed away further with the Quad Damage too. There's a lot of interesting stuff in this.

[Redneckerz]

Epic find, @InDOOMnesia!

 

Did some digging on its graphical hardware. Voodoo graphics in arcades weren't new (Konami used them, as did Midway/Atari/Taito) and in Konami's case paired them with PowerPC processors, but Quake ATE's version is more impressive since its from Obsidian.

The specific card used is a Obsidian 100SB-4440V. So what, you say... except that this was Voodoo 1 in SLI. For those who don't know: SLI (Scan-Line-Interleaving) would be popular for consumers with Voodoo 2. Few knew that Voodoo 1 supported a similar feature, but Obsidian was one of few that actually enabled the feature with their custom cards. Not only that, they came with ''Shades'', extra Texture Management Unit modules.

 

The Dodge Garage writes about this card:

Quote

''The awesome Obsidian 100SB-4440 and 100SB-4440V- The top of line in the Voodoo Graphic series with dual Voodoo Graphics chipsets in single board SLI with extra TMU modules (called SHADES) and in the case of the 4440V a 2D daughter card (MGV) for good measure! 

 

Back in 1997 the 4440V retailed for $1895!

 

The 100DB was superceded by the 100SB's pictured above. This things are beasts and run great! They are as as fast as a Voodoo II in some games!''

 

The result is a beast of a video card:

Quote

• Chipset: 2x Voodoo Graphics
• chip clock 50MHz
• memory 22MB EDO-RAM
• 2x 2MB Framebuffer
• 4x 4MB Texturmemory
• 2MB VGA
• memory clock 50MHz
• memory interface 6x 64Bit (4x64 w/o Shades) +2D
• memory bandwidth 2,4GB/sec (1,6GB/sec w/o Shades) +2D
• MegaPixel/sec 100
• MegaTexel/sec 200 (100 w/o Shades)
• max 3D resolution 800x600

Info: Both pages, but TDG in particular has practically every epic Voodoo related card known to man. One of the best 3DFX sources around.

• TDFX
• The Dodge Garage

[taufan99]

14 hours ago, unerxai said:

That's mindblowing. I didn't know this arcade even existed.

 

The different secrets in E1M1 make me curious. Maybe they wanted the maps to be more linear to make the gameplay more arcadey? The enemies are pushed away further with the Quad Damage too. There's a lot of interesting stuff in this.

I'm not quite sure if they're different. At least compared to the N64 port that cut down some secrets (like that ledge in the second door switch-lamp).

@Redneckerz That's equally epic information. I'm still surprised they managed to make a bunch of arcade games with such an advanced late-90's hardware run on MAME... in the software renderer. Just like what @Dark Pulse said, "madness".

[Dark Pulse]

The emulation and preservation community at work, ladies and gentlemen.

 

I remember reading about the Arcade version of Quake in EGM, and certainly longed to play it (I had no PC of my own, and Quake 1 never came to Playstation), but seeing stuff like this makes a small part of me happy.

[Redneckerz]

3 hours ago, InDOOMnesia said:

I'm not quite sure if they're different. At least compared to the N64 port that cut down some secrets (like that ledge in the second door switch-lamp).

@Redneckerz That's equally epic information. I'm still surprised they managed to make a bunch of arcade games with such an advanced late-90's hardware run on MAME... in the software renderer. Just like what @Dark Pulse said, "madness".

Does Quake AT actually use the software renderer however if it calls of GLQuake? Or do you mean that these games use MAME's internal software renderer?

 

MAME has a lot of arcade systems that hold really unusual hardware - Full of custom 3D hardware with PowerPC processors acting as geometry engines. Its fascinating stuff.

[taufan99]

Just now, Redneckerz said:

Or do you mean that these games use MAME's internal software renderer?

This is what I exactly mean.

[Dark Pulse]

30 minutes ago, Redneckerz said:

Does Quake AT actually use the software renderer however if it calls of GLQuake? Or do you mean that these games use MAME's internal software renderer?

 

MAME has a lot of arcade systems that hold really unusual hardware - Full of custom 3D hardware with PowerPC processors acting as geometry engines. Its fascinating stuff.

MAME is always software-rendered even if it's emulating hardware. So it's emulating a hardware-accelerated version... in software. So yes, it's emulating Voodoo cards and whatnot in software.

 

See the questions "Why do some games run so slowly on my system?" and "Does MAME benefit from SMP (symmetric multiprocessing) / HT (Hyper-Threading) / dual cores?" on the following link:

 

https://wiki.mamedev.org/index.php/FAQ:Performance

[Redneckerz]

Thank you, both of you. :)

[unerxai]

6 hours ago, InDOOMnesia said:

I'm not quite sure if they're different. At least compared to the N64 port that cut down some secrets (like that ledge in the second door switch-lamp).

After reading your post I went to the game and... wow, you're right. In my 20 years of playing that map I never knew you could unlock those same secrets but from different places (the quad and the mega health). Crazy stuff.

[Vic Vos]

Oh wow, I was reading stuff about Quake Tournament Edition just last week. That's some very good news!

[HavoX]

All right, fuckin' A!

[david_a]

I didn't know there was such a thing as Voodoo 1 SLI; that's absolutely bizarre.

[Redneckerz]

55 minutes ago, david_a said:

I didn't know there was such a thing as Voodoo 1 SLI; that's absolutely bizarre.

Quantum3D actually spun off from 3DFX in the early years and that's how they got these bizarre contraptions for the consumer space.

 

Professionally, look no further than Primary Image.

Piranha:
 

• MIPS R5000 onboard with Voodoo 1 Graphics.
• ''This was a PCI board that had the following on it: - an embedded Mips R5000 200MHz processor that ran an embedded version of Glide driven by the client side part of the Tempest scene manager, the server side ran on the PC. The client side did all the cull/draw calculations thus relieving the PC's CPU of this burden and allowing multiple cards to be placed in a single PC (see below) - a Voodoo 1 FBI with 3 TMU's (to my knowledge this and the Barracudas are the only 3Dfx implementations by anyone to have 3 TMU's). This allowed for a tri-linear filtered base texture and a dithered trilinear filtered secondary texture, or even three dithered tri-linear textures in a single pass. - A daughter card with another Voodoo 1 FBI with another 3 TMU's. This was used in SLI mode with the set on the base card. The cards had a pixel bus connector system that allowed 2, 4 or 8 of them to be joined together and composited into a single channel to generate 2x, 4x or 8x rotated grid anti-aliasing. There were also tiling options so that half the cards could generate the left side of the screen and the other half the right side thus doubling the pixel fill rate and increasing the maximum resolution to 1280x1024. A second connector system was used to daisy chain the Pixel Clock, VSync and HSync signals, thus allowing multiple channels to be video synchronized. Industrial PC's were used which had up to 20 PCI slots in a 19 inch 6U rack mount chassis. The PC was a single board computer (SBC) that plugged into the end slot. This system was developed almost 2 years before Quantum3D debuted their 3Dfx based AA offering.''

Barracuda:

Barracuda board on top, ''Cruncher'' add-in board bottom.

• Same as Piranha except now you have a onboard MIPS R7000 processor doing geometry rendering along with onboard Voodoo 2 chips.
• ''In November 1998 Barracuda was released. This was similar to Piranha with the following updates - The Mips processor was upgraded to a 300MHz R7000. The Voodoo chips were upgraded to Voodoo 2, still 2 FBI and 6 TMU with the daughter card. An additional bus was added to optionally allow the geometry processing to be performed by a separate card (called Cruncher) which had two 300MHz MIPS R7000's. The Cruncher would broadcast the polygon data to all the Barracuda's in a single channel by DMAing to a memory window. The local R7000 on each Barracuda would read the polygon data, add it's own local sub-pixel offset for anti-aliasing, then send the draw commands to the Voodoo 2 chips. A Galileo PCI bridge was added so that the 3Dfx graphics chips were visible on the PC's PCI bus (on Piranha the PC could not directly access the Voodoo chips). Multi-card configuration options were the same as Piranha.''

Cruncher:

• Dual MIPS R7000 processors that would do additional geometry processing (Transform/lighting) and send this data to all Barracuda cards in the system.