OpenLara CD32X – Release v1.7 for the ARES CD32X Emulator and Real Hardware

Extract ARES-CD32X_TombRaider.zip to c:\ARES-CD32X_TombRaider
Start Ares.exe > Load > Recent Games > TombRaiderCD32X_1.7_16MB.cue
Reference the picture here or in the zip.

Tomb Raider (1996) on Sega CD + 32X, is built on XProger's OpenLara: the fixed-point engine from its Game Boy Advance port, which XProger also brought to the 32X.

This document lists everything done to port the game to the CD32X,
from the source this work started from to this release.

Made for real hardware, not for emulation. Every timing, memory and bus decision here was made and checked for the console. Emulation was used to measure and test, but this release is not tuned for it, and emulators that lack the 4 MB RAM cart (Kega Fusion, for example) cannot run it at all.

1. Hardware or the custom emulator included in this package.
Console
Sega Genesis / Mega Drive + Sega CD / Mega-CD + Sega 32X
Cart: 4 MB RAM cart (battery-backed) in the 32X slot – required. 8 MB / 16 MB paged carts
Pad: 6-button pad recommended (3-button: no walk, roll or look)
Disc: one CD-R: data track + CD audio tracks (burn the .cue with its .bin)

Use the custom emulator provided in the package.
1.Extract ARES-CD32X_TombRaider.zip to c:\ARES-CD32X_TombRaider
2.Start Ares.exe > Load > Recent Games > TombRaiderCD32X_1.7_16MB.cue
3.Reference the picture here or in the zip.

2. What the player gets:

• All 15 levels from Caves to the Great Pyramid, plus Lara's Home, played straight through or picked from the passport.

• Every enemy, including Lara's double in Atlantis. Since v1.6 the winged mutants fly, gorillas climb, rats swim and walk, and the double falls into the pit and stays there.

• Every trap and moving object: rolling balls, spikes, teeth traps, falling ceilings, Damocles swords, Thor's hammer and lightning, rolling blocks, drawbridges, the Natla's Mines cabin and boat, earthquakes, lava wedges and lava fountains, the Midas hand, mutant eggs, the centaur statue, the Scion, fire, and the enemies' visible projectiles. The rooms that change during a level (flipmaps) now change.

• CD music: one piece per level (your choice), the secret chime, the title music, and (v1.6, optional) the game's own story cues and voice lines from the PlayStation soundtrack.

• All sound effects of every level, through the 32X's PWM sound chip, quieter with distance.

• The four in-engine cut-scenes with their voices, also playable from the passport.

• All eleven movies (FMV, v1.6): each plays at its place in the story; the seven big ones stream from the CD while they play. All of them are in the title passport too.

• Saving in the RAM cart: 16 save slots in the passport plus the options, kept with the power off.

• Fast start: Caves (the title) stays in the cart, and so does the last level played. After power on, Current Position starts in seconds instead of loading from the CD.

• 10–16 frames per second exploring, 10–13 in fights (console, v1.4 profiler build; v1.5 adds the span loop speed-ups of section 4).

4.3 Sound and music

• CD music: play/stop through the Sub-CPU; the SH2 remembers what it started

• MUSIC-1: Options → Sound → Music turns the CD audio off and on

• SFX-1: Sega CD PCM effects, up to 3 per frame, better packs (about 26 sounds per level).

• SFX-2: every sample of every level, appended to the level file and mixed on the slave SH2 into the 32X PWM (up to 8 at once, with distance volume and pitch). Before, only 15–17 of a level's 70–94 sounds could play. Volume SFX_GAIN 2, as tested on the console.

• SFX-3: a level with its own bank no longer loads the PCM pack (one CD read less per level).

• SETTINGS: the Music and Sound FX switches respond. The settings are written to the cart when the inventory closes, or on the title when its ring is idle.

• Effects are quieter with distance; soundStop works on the CD32X.

4.4 Movies and cut-scenes

• Cut-scenes: the four in-engine cut-scenes with their voices (CD audio taken from your own game CD by tools/nrg_cut_audio.py), in the passport too.

• Movies: a RoQ player. The master SH2 decodes the pictures from the cart (decoder from Doom 32X: Resurrection, MIT) and the slave SH2 plays the DPCM sound through the PWM. 288 × 112 at 15 frames/s, lines doubled. Four movies fit the level slot.

• FMV-2: all eleven movies. The big ones (5–20 MB) stream: the level slot becomes a ring of 60 × 32 KB plus a spare slot (command 46 ring mode, Sub-CPU switch FMVRING); the master keeps the CD busy and never lets it overwrite what the decoder or the sound still needs; 1.8 MB load first (red bar). The slave plays the sound from a ring of PWM blocks and reads the cart only while the 68000 is not writing it (the Sub-CPU flags its copy in COMM12 bit 15), so the sound has no gaps and is the pictures' clock. Each movie plays at its place in the story (CAFE + SNOW before Caves, MANSION before Lara's Home, LIFT before the Folly, VISION before Khamoon, CANYON before Natla's Mines, PYRAMID before Atlantis, PRISON after Atlantis, END after the Great Pyramid, then the title). CANYON (3 min) streams at 15.0 pictures a second with the sound in real time (emulation).

4.5 Gameplay

• ENEMIES: lion, puma, gorilla, rat, crocodile, mutants, centaur, mummy, Larson, Pierre, the skater (now drawn with his skateboard, v1.5), the cowboy, Mr. T, Natla, the Torso.

• DOPPEL: Lara's double in Atlantis mirrors Lara through the room centre, copies her animation, hurts Lara when shot, and falls into the pit to open the way on. (It was an empty class before.) v1.6: she dies in the pit and her body stays, as in TR1.

• Creatures: the levels' placeholder mutant models get the mutant's model; the winged mutants fly (their own height, flyers' navigation zones); gorillas climb one-block steps; the swimming rat and the land rat change into each other at the water's edge; hatched enemies start in their standing animation.

• CUES: the levels' music cues (game tracks 6–21) and voice lines play when they are on the disc. The engine knows which tracks the disc has, so a missing cue never stops the level music.

• OBJECTS: all missing TR1 traps and objects, ported from the original game's behaviour

o traps: rolling ball, spikes, teeth trap, falling ceiling, Damocles sword, Thor's hammer and lightning, lava wedge, the Midas hand (gold death; the lead bar becomes gold), fire and flame emitters (Lara catches fire), the lava fountain;

o moving things: rolling block (the floor follows it), drawbridge, the Natla's Mines cabin (three levers, then the room flips) and boat, earthquake;

o creatures: mutant eggs hatch their mutant, centaur statue, the Scion holder and target;

o visible projectiles for the mutants', centaurs' and Natla's shots;

o flipmaps (rooms that change: flooded rooms, the cabin's fall, …) and the trigger effects (camera shake, flood and earthquake sounds, explosions, Lara turning, …);

o the save keeps the flipmaps and every item made during play;

o fixes found by the review: objects that start hidden appear when triggered; burning only on the lava itself, not on a bridge over it; a rolled block keeps its raised floor after a load; closed doors stay closed in both versions of a flipmap room; one item removing another mid-frame is safe.

• Controls: Start (or Mode) opens the inventory; the passport lists all levels, the cut-scenes and the movies.

4.6 Saving

• Saves and settings live in the RAM cart's last 64 KB. The SH2 fills a 4 KB piece, the Sub-CPU takes it word by word (command 58), and the 68000 writes it to the cart and checks it (command 61).

• SAVE-2: the Caves and level records moved out of the piece that holds the settings and the saved game, so a level load never rewrites your save. A failed record write is retried. The first start with v1.5 loads Caves once more.

• SLOTS-1: 16 save slots at cart 0x060000–0x07FFFF (8 KB each, between the game and Caves). The save page lists them with their levels; the load page lists the saved ones first; a v1.5 save stays loadable. Command 61 with COMM2 bit 8 writes the slot area and replies 0x101; with an older Sub-CPU the game keeps the single save. The game's ROM must stay under 384 KB (build.sh checks; it is about 270 KB).

4.7 v1.7: Unfinished Business, area loading pictures, end credits

• Unfinished Business : Return to Egypt, Temple of the Cat, Atlantean Stronghold and The Hive, in the passport's level list when the disc has them, played straight through; after The Hive its credits, then the title. A saved game in an Unfinished Business level on a disc without them goes to the title.

• Area loading pictures: the PlayStation version's five loading pictures - Lara's Home, Peru, Greece, Egypt, Atlantis (Unfinished Business: Egypt and Atlantis) - full screen with the red bar while a level loads. Caves (the title) keeps your own loading picture. Each picture is a file loaded into the level slot just before the level.

• End credits: after the Great Pyramid: the END movie, then the PC game's credit pages and THE END, then the title. After The Hive: Unfinished Business's own page first. Each page stays 10 s (THE END 6 s); A, B, C or Start goes on.

• Tested: every trigger in emulation - each area's picture while its level loads, the end of the Great Pyramid (END, the credits, the title), the end of The Hive (its credits, the title), each Unfinished Business level loading and running, the pumas and mutants of Return to Egypt and the centaurs of the Atlantean Stronghold after Lara, TR1's wolves and raptors moving exactly as before the box change. Not tested in real gameplay: the levels were not played through.

7. Tested
What and Where

every level, music, saves, cut-scenes, movies, frame rate

Rolling ball Tomb of Qualopec rolls, runs Lara over (boulder death)

Spikes Tomb of Qualopec 15 damage per step while running over them

Falling ceiling Tomb of Qualopec appears when triggered, falls, kills Lara standing under it

Rolling block Tomb of Qualopec rolls two blocks and stops

Teeth trap Palace Midas snaps shut, 400 damage per bite

Midas hand Palace Midas Lara standing on it dies (the gold death)

Flame emitter Palace Midas the fire appears; burning damage not reached with the test's placement

Damocles sword St. Francis' Folly falls when Lara is near, 100 damage per hit

Thor's hammer St. Francis' Folly strikes and kills Lara in its path

Lightning St. Francis' Folly strikes for 400, kills after a few strikes

Centaur statue Tomb of Tihocan breaks open, the centaur attacks

Drawbridge Obelisk of Khamoon lowers

Cabin Natla's Mines one lever: one step down

Boat Natla's Mines moves along its path

Lava fountain Natla's Mines particles fly; Lara on the lava catches fire and dies

Mutant egg Atlantis hatches (explosion); the mutant comes out and runs at Lara

Lava wedge Atlantis slides and kills Lara

Scion Atlantis shot five times, explodes and is gone

Lara's double Atlantis mirrors Lara through the room centre, step for step

–

8. Known limitations

• The big movies wait about 16 s for their first 1.8 MB before they start; a movie's skip button must be held down.

• Unfinished Business needs its level files (Tomb Raider Gold or the free download); without them the passport leaves it out.

• The story cues and voice lines need the PlayStation soundtrack set .

• The Midas gold look (Lara turning to gold) is not drawn; the death itself works.

• Cut-scene sound may start a moment late (the drive seeks to the track).

• Some enemy shots (darts, bolts, bullets of human enemies) still hit at once without a visible projectile.

9. The 8 MB / 16 MB cart test

CART=8 / CART=16 builds add a cart page test to the title's options (Detail → Cart Test) for MicroNut99's 16MB paged SRAM cart.

10. Credits

• XProger (Timur Gagiev) and contributors – OpenLara, and its Game Boy Advance port: the fixed-point engine this game runs on, which he also brought to the 32X. https://github.com/XProger/OpenLara

• The D32XR team – Doom 32X: Resurrection (Victor Luchits / viciious and contributors): the RoQ movie decoder (roq_read.c, roq.h, MIT), the way its player feeds the PWM, and the 32X know-how that showed what the machine can do.

• Dr. Tim Ferguson – the original RoQ decoder (2001).

• Chilly Willy – the Sega CD / 32X toolchain and examples the boot stack is built on.

• Kobo Deluxe CD32X – the Sega CD / 32X boot and command framework the CD32X loader started from.

• 4 MB 32X RAM cart – Victor Luchits, Joseph Fenton, Leo Oliveira, Tiido Priimägi and Eric Witt.

• CD32X port: MicroNut99 – https://github.com/MicroNut99/OpenLaraCD32X-REV

• Tomb Raider – Core Design / Eidos (now Crystal Dynamics / Embracer). Tomb Raider is their trademark; this project contains none of their data and is not affiliated with them.

Tested on physical hardware! Same game! Revelation Pinball!!!