A Full Motion Video Codec For the Atari ST

A developer named Jonas Eschenburg has pulled off an engineering feat that would've seemed impossible: getting a forty-one-year-old Atari ST computer to play full-motion video from Command and Conquer, a game that didn't exist until a decade after the machine shipped. The Atari ST's eight-megahertz processor and sixteen-color graphics are nowhere near what the original game required, but Eschenburg built a codebook-based video codec that splits frames into easily-addressable blocks and updates both the color palette and codebook as the video plays—a technique that works with the ST's memory architecture in ways raw pixel streaming simply cannot. The fully playable port, cutscenes and all, is available now on Itch-dot-io, Hackaday reports.

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