Quake Arcade Tournament Edition

You probably heard of the Quake - Arcade Tournament Edition. An arcade machine with Quake built by LBE Systems/Lazer-Tron in 1998.


Just recently I understood what MAME is all about and eventually I knew how to get nearer to this thing. And yes, to my gratitude there actually is a harddisk image of this machine floating around in torrents. The file is named quakeat.chd (225 Megabytes) and you might find it in some huge romsets (CHD/LD are terms you will want to look for).

That quakeat.chd is the image of the harddisk from the arcade machine. You cannot run it through MAME at the time of writing because at least the BIOS image is missing. But you can mount the disk image and take a peek inside. Following is how I managed to do that (on Linux, have fun on Windows…) and some of what I found.


$ file quakeat.chd 
quakeat.chd: MAME CHD compressed hard disk image, version 4

So let's uncompress that image. MAME comes with a tool for that job, chdman (do get the latest official binaries, if you get an error about a wrong format, that's what you did not do). I used Wine below because I could not be arsed to hunt for a Linux binary.

$ wine chdman.exe -extract quakeat.chd quakeat.img
[Output stripped]
$ file quakeat.img 
quakeat.img: x86 boot sector, Microsoft Windows XP mbr,Serial 0x31f533a1; partition 1: ID=0xb, active, starthead 1, startsector 63, 4225473 sectors, code offset 0x33

Now you cannot simply mount that image, it contains a mbr. Checking the file with fdisk shows where the actual data partition starts.

$ fdisk -l -u quakeat.img 
You must set cylinders.
You can do this from the extra functions menu.

Disk quakeat.img: 0 MB, 0 bytes
128 heads, 63 sectors/track, 0 cylinders, total 0 sectors
Units = sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes
Disk identifier: 0x31f533a1

      Device Boot      Start         End      Blocks   Id  System
quakeat.img1   *          63     4225535     2112736+   b  W95 FAT32

So the size of a sector is 512 bytes and the partition we want starts at sector 63. 63*512 = 32256. Thankfully you can tell mount where to start.

$ mount -o loop,offset=32256 quakeat.img /where/ever/you/want/


Now, what's inside and can you run it? It looks like a (almost) normal Quake installation. The pak files in id1 are extracted. There is a glquake.exe but sadly it will tell you "E020C – Security key not found". Seems like one would need a dongle. The engine also seems to have been modified to display AVI movies. There is a directory with movies inside that are referenced in quake.rc alternating with normal demos. They show instructions, credits and company logos.

There are some files related to accounting and prizes. 6 progs (progs.dat, progshipnotic.dat, Progsreaper.dat, progsqtv.dat (clanring something), progsrogue.dat, progszeus.dat). I could not figure out how to run the "Arcade Tournament" game though. Maybe someone more into QC and hacking will shed more light onto it.

The default.cfg says Quake - Arcade Tournament Edition 1.30 r3, it also contains a password (could that be related to the engine?) and suggests that opus.exe is related to the Joystick. There are many variables prefixed with a_ which suggests "arcade_".

It seems like the two official missionpacks are included. Also a qdqstart.bsp (which is quite a weird modified start map, most probably not related to Quake done Quick). There are also modified player models showing the current weapon (like vweps in some QW configurations nowadays).

The file C:\WIN386.SWP contains a lot of Quake related strings.

There are two Quake directories in the image: C:\Quake and C:\backup\Quake . The timestamps in the backup directory are from 2008 while most of the ones in the root are from 1998. The files ID1/config.cfg and id1/config.old.cfg are different where C:\backup-Quake\ID1\config.cfg is identical to C:\Quake\ID1\config.old.cfg . C:\Quake has two additional log files from 2008 in ID1/accting/ .

The quake.rc remaps CD tracks and in a comment to this it says "remap tracks based on new MOD sound track". This might hint at Methods of Destruction. It might also hint at .mod files.

Many files have a copyright note: "Copyright © 1997-98 by David R. Foley, All Rights Reserved". Random links: http://vpforums.org/index.php?showtopic=159 https://twitter.com/#!/davidrfoley http://www.nanotechent.com/team-3.php http://www.gamasutra.com/php-bin/news_index.php?story=24691 http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2009/07/10/BA6L18LLG3.DTL

The quake.rc has a changelog. First entry is 05/19/98, last one on 08/25/98.

Comparing the Quake directory to id1, hipnotic and rogue

Comparing the game directory to stock id1, rogue and hipnotic (extracted in that order, overwriting existing files).

Apart from the new directories AVIs/, Demos/, accting/, glquake/ (meshes…) and tickets/ there are:

status file origin or md5sum
new many cfg files, some backups, tailored quake.rc
new PROGSQTV.DAT c8a01fc1c12d83a6f31bebc89b6bb261
new Progsreaper.dat progs.dat from reaprb81.zip
changed gfx.wad bc13811d542abc75078dd001276b810d, not identical to any of id1, hipnotic or rogue
changed progs.dat identical to id1/progs.dat
new progshipnotic.dat identical to hipnotic/progs.dat
new progsrogue.dat identical to rogue/progs.dat
new progszeus.dat c69cf7f62e5e2ece0168779c465982da
new tim.wad 2611e83403f120a6d06bd0295a581f0f, fixed as timfixed.zip
new gfx/ARCADEMM.LMP 009f3afac6ef8e59685602ad999d6d3e
gfx/conback.lmp identical to hipnotic/gfx/conback.lmp
new gfx/conback-id.lmp identical to id1/gfx/conback.lmp
new gfx/conback-r.lmp identical to rogue/gfx/conback.lmp
new maps/dm7.bsp not checked against the official original dm7.bsp
changed maps/e1m6.bsp c2eface086839e8f622e410ab96ef557, bindiff shows minor differences
changed maps/hip2m4.bsp 093b457469e44189763098d8ac8da013, bindiff shows minor differences, just one texture changed?
changed maps/hip3m3.bsp 966465455cb5bd432f44f80a2667fa69, bindiff shows minor differences, just one texture changed?
new maps/hipstart.bsp identical to hipnotic/maps/start.bsp
new maps/qdqstart.bsp bf0a0bb5f47540156454f3c449c88894, no spawnpoints, seems like id1/start.bsp with the e4 way cut off. Has some new textures LINK
new maps/rstart.bsp identical to rogue/maps/start.bsp
changed maps/start.bsp identical to id1/maps/start.bsp
changed progs/backpack.mdl 4cc90874aea67c917a475bb11e887c57, backpack with 5 additional skins that are a animated gift wrapped pack LINK
new progs/backpackorg.mdl identical to id1/progs/backpack.mdl
new progs/backpackquestion.mdl 82a3feef128681489ab135d406d86822, backpack with 5 additional skins LINK
new progs/hud_box.spr from Zeus bot, zeus2042.zip
new progs/hud_stat.spr from Zeus bot, zeus2042.zip
new progs/hud_tag.spr from Zeus bot, zeus2042.zip
new progs/player-orig.mdl identical to id1/progs/player.mdl
changed progs/player.mdl 0c94e297f73b9be09f3f39b8946795f3, with 15 additional skins
new progs/playergr.mdl 023ff04fb394fa422c65d13cd4016300, all playerXX.mdl are the stock player.mdl with the id1 skin and a weapon model attached
new progs/playernl.mdl 2660c386dc2b4b274f46b34abcbe6a19
new progs/playerrl.mdl 3aac352bb025d215a343b4348c75cf08
new progs/playersg.mdl 94a76dd79f384c662dee388f8c5ea88b
new progs/playersn.mdl 9e319a846e318aa9d7feb7609ec23703
new progs/playerss.mdl af4fa11e01dd90a19eeca14388dea438
new progs/s_plasma.spr 7c0887630ed468205292d8cb7abcae93
new progs/s_plasmax.spr progs/s_plasma.spr from zeus2042.zip
new sound/demon/dland2-arc.wav identical to id1/sound/demon/dland2.wav
changed sound/demon/dland2.wav from Zeus bot, zeus2042.zip
new sound/misc/boing.wav 2c80a4c53b2c7ab45ba0c94ca14fe440 LINK
new sound/misc/gloria.wav e4cc18ec5076478d9309fd7589ea3921 LINK
changed sound/misc/talk.wav cce3c52d9cb8da2438ce5ccd051da801 LINK
new sound/plasma/plasexpl.wav from Zeus bot, zeus2042.zip
new sound/plasma/plasma.wav from Zeus bot, zeus2042.zip
new sound/player/deepbrth.wav b6fac69ecd48a187bc15f76410c43590 LINK
new sound/player/dmalarm.wav feaaf478e466ce5b0cc6f14b78737115 LINK
new sound/player/sucker.wav from Zeus bot, zeus2042.zip
new sound/prize/instaprz.wav 57483bf441363156a941c592fd8f2d18 LINK
new sound/prize/sparkles.wav 917870ad376e6da2501d432c0db90fb3 LINK