Tetris Forever: some poking around!

I am at the point of "posting about Tetris Forever enough that I need to continue" I guess. Anyway, you may have noticed my lament that the PC game offerings in it are disappointingly limited. Well...

In general, Digital Eclipse's collections keep all their assets hidden away in encrypted archives. But these are fairly easily decrypted (since they kinda have to be in order to run the games), which can be a nice way to get arguably-legal access to ROMs for your emulation purposes. There's a tool called Cowabunga on Github that'll work for most of their recent releases. So I gave that a whirl on Tetris Forever.

Cowabunga spits out a decrypted zip file, with a tantalising list of folders, but what we're interested in is the ROMs section. There's folders for AppleII, DOS, GB, NES and SNES. The GB, NES and SNES sections contain ROMs that work exactly as you would expect in your favourite emulator - and interestingly some of them seem to be named in the sorts of naming patterns you'd find in ROMs obtained online (e.g. listing the revision and the region and such). TBH it is entirely reasonable that, even if they did dump ROMs from their own cartridges, they'd probably want to run them through some sort of verification tool to make sure it's not a bad dump, so I don't particularly have an issue with this. I do note that there's two different revisions of Tetris 2 + Bombliss here - not sure which one is actually used. There's also a few Game Boy BIOS files, I assume they're some sort of reimplementation and not Nintendo's original BIOS though lol.

Things get a bit interesting with the Apple II section. Inside Tetris Forever we are just given a single Apple II version of the game to play, but we seem to have three different versions available here. They're labeled 48k, 48k-iie, and 128k, presumably different versions for different models of Apple II. I am not sure which one is actually used, one would HOPE the theoretically-better 128k version? But it's interesting.

Where things REALLY get spicy is the DOS section. Initially, opening this up we just see a file called "dreamm.ifs". Not sure what IFS stands for (google suggests Installable File System but that seems to be a specific Microsoft API that's probably not related) but DREAMM is the DOS emulator that Aaron Giles developed for playing Lucasarts games and licensed out to Digital Eclipse for this collection.

Anyway, it turns out this IFS file is actually a ZIP file (it's got that telltale PK header) so that means 7zip can open it up fine and we can see what's in it. Two folders, "game" and "install". "game" has a .info file that seems to contain configuration options, we'll come back to that, but "install" has in it a plethora of different Tetris versions!

So, Tetris Forever as released gives you two DOS versions to play with, a version of Vadim Gerasimov's original DOS port, and a version of Spectrum Holobyte's DOS port. What we have here though is FOUR different versions of the Vadim Gerasimov port, as well as two versions of Spectrum Holobyte's version. And on top of that we have Welltris, Faces, Super Tetris, and Tetris Classic. Which are all versions that got some reasonable coverage in Tetris Forever, but weren't themselves playable!

Let's go back to that .info file. It's got some settings presumably for configuring different sound card emulation, but also contains definitions for each of the different included versions. With comments! There's not much details on the Vadim Gerasimov versions, just that they're labeled "early version 0, early version 1, version 1, and version 3". For the Spectrum Holobyte version there's the note that the earlier and later version differ in terms of title screen and backgrounds - presumably the later one is the version where the plane landing at Red Square was taken out.

There's also configuration details for the non-included version. A common theme is notes that the provided versions were cracked, and the developer of the DOS emulation then went and sourced original versions to replace them - which is interesting in terms of a look behind the scenes of how these sorts of compilations are assembled. There's a fair amount of data for automating the bypassing of copy protection, which is something DREAMM does with the Lucasarts games too.

So yeah, on the DOS side we have a fairly sizable number of extra versions that aren't accessible, even though a fair amount of work had seemingly been done to get them working (sourcing different versions etc). I find myself wondering why they were omitted - rights issues? Seems concerning that the files were still shipped in that case. Couldn't get the emulation working in time? Given that these are PC games, presumably the controls would have had to be mapped to a gamepad for the console versions, maybe that was an issue - and we know that the PC versions are something of a late inclusion anyway. In any case, I do kinda hope they can be patched in or something, as it'd make the "Spectrum Holobyte" side of the Tetris story a bit more complete.

Seriously recommend poking around if you have any of these collections, haha.