u/guizmox44

Hello !

As most of you do know, Gizmondo Colors was supposed to be kind of a Pokemon GO game 20 years before it !

Colors would have be a game changer for the Gizmondo, exploiting all of its possibilities : GPS, camera, internet, 3D, etc to allow players from all around the world to play online !

You also know that Gizmondo closed its doors before the release of the game and while its been leaked online, you can only play the solo campaign, the server code was scrapped and never activated...

...and nobody has never been able to experience the true potential of "Colors".

Well, as part of my prevervation work for the Gizmondo, I spent the last 15 years to grab information about the game, from the developers, designers, sub-contractors ; gathering every bit of information about the multiplayer mode, and even tried to ask the original sub-contractor (UK-based company Netlight) if they could find the server source code...

Some people even tried at some point to recreate the server code (Otaku - the guy that built the Service Pack B)

Well... Now we have AI and its reverse-engineering power.

I feeded GPT with ALL of the information I had (I fully know how it was supposed to be played), even an E3 video presentation of "Turf Wars", the game manual that was never released, the Gizmondo SDK, game binaries, etc...

Because AI had to rebuild a whole server code FROM SCRATCH ! Including the database, API calls, maps system (taken from OSM)

And since there's an emulator coming (PocketHLE) that I'm forking specifically for the Gizmondo, it needed to implement all of the Gizmondo special features (camera, gps, data, etc...) on both Windows & Android versions.

That was 2 separate works : the client emulator itself, and the server code.

Thanks to intensive days of prompting sessions, explanations, context, debug, etc... we now have a fully working Colors Turf Wars Multiplayer Mode !!!

That was unexpected. But finally, after 20 years, we have it. And it's gonna be great !

What's next for you ?

- I'm going to release my emulator fork in the coming days (Windows + Android).

- I'll deploy the server code publicly outside of my dev environment so that you can set its adress in the emulator settings (there's a re-retouting since the original game was doind calls to gizmondo servers)

- And finally, you'll gonna be able to play Turf Wars from anywhere in the world !

Coming (VERY) soon.

The attached pictures have been taken straight from the emulator and my local server running.
Video Sample : https://youtube.com/shorts/v3BE5ChOrRk

Some of you may remember an obscure prototype called "Supernaturals" (Download Supernaturals (Gizmondo) - My Abandonware)

There's barely nothing to say about this demo, when you launch it, it opens a bestiary in which you can choose between a few 3D-animated creatures and read about their skills (it's an RPG) but that's it. You can't do more than that. You can't even escape the demo.

But what's weird is that the game do have beautiful concept arts that can be seen in the E3 EPK DVD. And during my conversations with people that worked on it (Warthog Manchester team) I felt like the game had a lot of potential and a lot of design work had already been done.

For the last 15 years, I was convinced that there was more than that in that prototype but somehow the build that we have was broken. I never gave up about thinking that we had something special here...

Evidences :

• The assets file is 8mb, which does not match with what we have, especially if we're parsing it, there's a lot of sounds, textures, levels, etc...
• Decompiling ARM code shows that there's way more code than what we have in the current prototype state (including a menu)
• A few gameplay pictures has been shown to the press at E3 2005
• I asked the original developers and designers about the game (contacted so many people using linkedin !)

As part of a preservation project, I always wanted to restore what we can from that demo but was completely unsure if we could patch the ARM compiled file to make it work.

During the years, I asked to experienced ARM developers if they could give it a shot by decompiling and patching the game. No luck. Even the original devs tried to track down at least bits of the source code but... no luck. With the fate of the Gizmondo, everything was scrapped.

Now with the rise of AI, I recently thought about asking GPT to give it a shot.

You know what happened. After days of intensive prompting based on feeding the AI with all of the information I had, based on what I knew about the game : technical details about the file format, about the Tusk engine (used for all Warthog games), about the compression methods - got all of those from the original devs -, about the gizmondo specificities, and my own discoveries as well, etc... GPT was able to restore a working prototype !

It's been done by patching the original binary. It's NOT a recreation.

The game now starts with the never seen main menu.

It was originally meant for E3, and behind each of the menu items, there was a video to show. Those videos do not exists, so I asked GPT to wire some working test levels instead.

It was NOT a straightforward process. There was A LOT to fix and recover. I tried not to take any liberties, but to restore the prototype to a visually acceptable condition that closely resembles what it should have been.

• Start Game : Wired to a city test level in which you can walk around, there's also a PNJ
• Bestiary : You've already seen it :)
• Journal : Wired to a cut scene (cinematic) in a graveyard in which you can see the 3D creatures moving around
• Community : Wired to a combat level - partially working. Was really in an early dev. state for testing purposes
• Options : Placeholder for language selection

There's obviously more in the prototype, but with careful investigation, we restored what is acceptable to try and play according to the available assets (there's a lot of missing data : animations, textures so we had to figure out what we can use and what was at least partially working).

Don't expect much from the prototype but it's working and finally restored in its full glory !

About the game :

Supernaturals (Game) - Giant Bomb Video Game Wiki

Download Link (replace original EXE) + concept arts from E3 2005 EPK : See the comments

Oh, and one more thing... there's a Gizmondo emulator nearly finished and close to be released (forked by me based on PocketHLE - guizmox/PocketHLE: A high-level Windows Mobile / Pocket PC / Gizmondo emulator for Linux, Windows and Android.)

All games working sounds+graphics) so you won't need to buy an expensive and sticky console to try it !

Spcial thanks to u/F_i_r_e_F_l_y for the great help.