Sega’s ‘90s-tastic Night Trap being ported from Mega-CD and 32X to HTML5

Sega’s ‘90s-tastic Night Trap being ported from Mega-CD and 32X to HTML5

Despite being developed in 1992 using 68K assembly code, there are issues.

Mark Walton – Jul 21, 2015 4:23 pm | 3

The Sega CD and 32X weren’t exactly the most successful of console accessories, even if the wonderfully ’90s advertising made it look like they were the most awesome things you could possibly attach to a lone Sega Mega Drive (or Genesis to our US friends). The trouble was, besides one large Sonic-shaped exception, the games for the Sega Mega-CD and 32X were… well, they were bad. Really bad.

Case in point: Night Trap, an interactive movie video game that pooled together all of the worst things about the promised CD-ROM revolution of the 1990s. Like other games that made use of “full motion video,” there was little actual gameplay to back the shoddy acting. If anything, the only reason people even remember Night Trap at all was because it was cited in the mid-1990s US Congressional hearings, along with Mortal Kombat, Lethal Enforcers and Doom, as examples of video game violence destroying the minds of youth.

Perhaps it’s the fact that Night Trap was pulled from store shelves—which made it kind of hard to get hold of and play on the 32X and Sega Mega-CD—as well as defunct releases on the 3DO and PC, that inspired developer Dave Voyles to port the game in its entirety to HTML5 and other Web technologies. While the port is still very much a work in progress, Voyles goes into great detail about the process in a post over at Gamasutra.

At the moment, if you play Voyles’ browser port of Night Trap, it streams the assets from Azure Media Services, and plays them through the open source video.js player as an .mp4. There are currently eight cameras, which you can switch between using the HTML5 video player. Sadly, there isn’t much gameplay at this point, with the player just watching the characters as they bounce between the rooms.

The ’90s FMV wonder that is Sega’s Night Trap.

What’s interesting are the difficulties Voyles is running into, including the fact that he can’t get a browser to download eight different video feeds at the same time.

“I was also working on a way to cache the video locally,” he writes, “so that I don’t need to serve the content from Azure each time a user loads the page. Unfortunately, with adaptive bitrate streaming I am not able to do this. Back to the drawing board. How is this an issue for me today, in 2015, when the original developers wrote this game code in 1992 using 68K assembly? Even worse, the console only had 6Mb of RAM, so how were they getting these large video clips cached, and then switching between them so quickly?”

Voyles discovered that the footage on the Sega Mega-CD and 32X versions of the game wasn’t stored as large chunks video, but instead as teeny clips. It’s easy to forget that the Sega Mega-CD (released as just “Sega CD” in the USA) could only draw 64 colours on screen at once, and that processing its miniscule 256×224 pixel video clips was quite the challenge for the 12.5MHz Motorola 68000 that powered it.

While Voyles has managed to decipher the file name codes and frame data from the 32X version of the game—which detail the room a clip takes place in, as well as an overall time stamp—and export them, the game is some ways off from being finished.

“If you are familiar with Night Trap, then you’ll understand that it’s similar to a Choose Your Own Adventure book, in that you need to capture these augers, or vampires, as they roam throughout a house,” continues Voyles. “These capture clips are very brief, generally between 5-10 seconds, and need to be spliced seamlessly into the scene. That’s where the hard part of this production is introduced. I need to write code that cleanly allows me to do that.”

Those interested in following the progress of the HTML5 port of Night Trap can follow along over on Gamasutra. If you want to lend a hand, Voyles’ code is open source and available on his GitHub. You can also watch some of the video clips that Voyles has managed to splice together thus far.