Cosmo's Cosmic Adventures
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This is the main page for Cosmo's Cosmic Adventures. For a complete list of all pages related to this game, visit the Cosmo's Cosmic Adventures category page.
Cosmo's Cosmic Adventure, also known simply as Cosmo, is a three part series chronicling the adventures of Cosmo, a small, green sucker-handed alien boy who is seeking his parents after a meteor collision forces them to land their ship on a dangerous and uncharted planet.
File formats
This section lists the major file formats used in the game.
| Use | Format | Details |
|---|---|---|
| Backgrounds | Full-screen planar EGA | 32,000 byte *.MNI files are 320x200 full-screen images (in four planes: blue, green, red, intensity). TITLE1.MNI is the image on the right, which is in this format. |
| Exit screen | B800 Text | 4000-byte *.MNI files are text screens shown at exit (e.g. NOMEMORY.MNI) |
| Graphics | Cosmo Tileset Format | ACTORS.MNI, BD*.MNI, CARTOON.MNI, MASKTILE.MNI, PLAYER.MNI and TILES.MNI are all tilesets |
| Group | VOL Format | group file storing the game data (both the *.VOL and *.STN files are in this format.) |
| Levels | Cosmo Level Format | A*.MNI are game levels. |
| Messages | - | Text is contained in the executable in all episodes, but in Cosmo 1 & 2, the executable is compressed by LZEXE, and can be uncompressed with UNLZEXE. |
| Music | IMF Format | Most of the M*.MNI files are music files, e.g. MHAPPY.MNI) - see #Notes below |
| Sounds | Inverse Frequency Sound format | SOUNDSx.MNI files are in this format, there are three per episode |
| Tile info | Cosmo Tileinfo Format | How to lay out the actor tiles. ACTRINFO.MNI, PLYRINFO.MNI and CARTINFO.MNI are in this format |
Notes
- The Cosmo engine was later updated and used for Duke Nukem II, which is why the games share a number of file formats.
- In the original Cosmo Engine, the graphics memory is allocated after the memory used for storing the IMF file loaded for the current level. This has the unfortunate side effect of corrupting the entire tileset graphics table in memory, turning the graphics into random colours when a complex IMF file is loaded. This is because the data from the IMF file overflows its allocated memory and overwrites the start of the tileset data. Of course this only happens in memory, so the corruption is not permanent upon exiting. The corruption will occur whenever that particular over-sized IMF file is loaded, but the corruption will completely disappear if the IMF file is removed from the group file or replaced with a less-complex version (i.e. by reducing the number of notes.) This does not appear to affect how the program runs, only affecting the tileset graphics. The overflow limit appears to be around 40K, which is above the size of nearly all Apogee IMF files, but not at the limit of IMF file size (64K for type-1, or effectively unlimited for type-0 as used in Cosmo.)
- The game reads from the VOL and STN files in preference to the current directory. Any game files in the current directory will not be read while the VOL/STN is present. To modify a file, it will either need to be imported back into the VOL/STN, or the VOL/STN should have its entire contents extracted into the game folder and then be removed or renamed.
