Dangerous Dave 2
| Levels? |  Not editable |
|---|---|
| Tiles? | Not editable |
| Sprites? | Not editable |
| Fullscreen? | Not editable |
| Sound? | Not editable |
| Music? | Not editable |
| Text? | Not editable |
| Story/cutscenes? | Not editable |
| UI/menus? | Not editable |
| Demos? | Unknown |
Dangerous Dave 2, also known as Dangerous Dave in the Haunted Mansion (DDitHM) is the second installment of the popular Dangerous Dave series (Third if DDiCI is counted.) Following Dangerous Dave and preceding Dangerous Dave 3: Dave's Risky Rescue.
In this installment Dave must rescue his younger brother Delbert from the Haunted Mansion. The game was severely cut down to fit onto a floppy disk and meet the release date, and so lacks appreciable story elements. The game was made utilizing a modified version of the Commander Keen 1-3 engine and thus uses many formats similar to Keen, though usually with more advanced compression.
File formats
This section lists the major file formats used in the game.
- B800 Text - 4000-byte internal files are text screens shown at exit.
- Commander Keen 1-3 Level format - LEVELxx.DD2 are game levels.
- Commander Keen EGA Header the EGA header is stored internally and is used to read graphics files.
- Dave 2 Tileinfo format - information about the properties of tiles are stored internally in the executable.
- Dave 2 Tileset format - TILES.DD2 contains the game tiles.
- EGA Font format monochrome font used in the game is stored in the executable.
- Inverse Frequency Sound format - the sound file is stored internally and uses Apogees 'inverse frequency' sound format.
- Full-screen planar EGA Most graphics are in this format, compressed or rearranged in various ways. For example, the 320x200 screen graphics are this compressed with Huffman Compression.
- RLEW compression The RLEB variant is used to compress the INTRO.DD2 file
- Dave 2 Huffman compression Used to compress most of the graphics files, a modification of the standard Huffman Compression.
- Text is contained in the executable, the executable is compressed with LZ compression, and can be uncompressed with UNLZEXE.
Notes
Dangerous Dave 2 stores the header and LATCH internally in the executable at 74896 and 101096 respectively (in the UNLZEXE'd executable.) Tiles are stored in a separate file EGATILES.DD2. Since each tile may or may not be loaded in a level depending on whether it's needed, the tile file is composed of 858 128-byte entries, each containing 4-EGA planes for the tile.
Shadow Knights, published just weeks later uses the Dave engine also and is even more similar than Keen.
Dave 2 is intermediate in development between Commander Keen 1-3 and Commander Keen Dreams which followed it. Though basic, it makes use of several changes in format that are used in later Keen games.
Tools
The following tools are able to work with this game.
| Name | Platform | Group/archives | Levels | Graphics | Music | Sounds | Text | Saves | .exe patch | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Wombat | Windows | N/A | View | View | View | View | View | No | View |