Tyrian 2000 - non-English versions & updated demo

[MrFlibble]

Tyrian 2000 was apparently marketed to European countries and translated into French, German and Spanish. Localized demo versions in all three languages were available from XSIV Games website (Wayback Machine copy), but since they were stored at Stealth Multimedia/Symmetry Entertainment FTPs the Internet Archive did not preserve them. Neither is any of the non-English versions found on various gaming magazine cover CDs that are included in Hallfiry's CD Index (which prominently features German cover CDs, and to some extent, French ones).

The only trace of these translated versions is the French interface which by mistake got into the SoundBlaster Live! patch for the English version (available here):


I wonder if anyone ever came across any of these versions, or maybe even has one of them somewhere?

Another thing of interest is the updated English demo of Tyrian 2000. The regular demo which can be found everywhere was released in October 1999, and still mentions Eclipse as the developer. However, the Wayback Machine has preserved an updated demo from World Tree Games website (Tyrian 2000 Demo.zip), which is dated November 2000.

This newer demo distribution lacks several files and thus cannot run on its own. The developers have acknowledged this mistake on their website (Wayback Machine copy):

::11 - 17 - 00 :: 1:40 :: Tyrian Demo Updated

An incomplete version of the Tyrian demo was uploaded. To download the right version click here. For those who don't know, Tyrian is a PC vertical scrolling shooter that you might as well try out because it's a lot of fun. The demo is quite long and full-featured!

This updated 2000 demo was apparently not preserved by the Internet Archive. Possibly, the same updated version was distributed by XSIV Games (Wayback Machine copy), but again since they stored everything at FTPs it was not archived.

As Litude helpfully suggested, some of the missing files can be obtained from the aforementioned SoundBlaster Live! patch (resulting in the French language sidebar interface). The updated demo replaces the Eclipse logo at startup with the World Tree Games logo, and also changes the copyright information on the main menu screen:


Updates to the code, including the Patch 01 fixes, are also present in this version, making it the most recent official release of the game. For comparison, the free full version which was released in 2004 is still the 1999 Eclipse version.

A functional copy of the newer demo can assembled from the incomplete distribution files and the SB Live! patch. Also Litude made a patch with the updated files which will work with the retail and the freeware versions (available here). The sidebar interface will be in French though.

If anyone has the full updated demo from 2000, and/or the non-English versions of the game (demo or otherwise), please tell!

[MrFlibble]

In the meantime I found these tools and used the tyrunpak.exe utility to replace the French sidebar image with the original English one, taken from the earlier version of the game. The fixed TYRIAN.PIC to be used with the updated demo can be downloaded here.

[MrFlibble]

Here's another thing. Because I took the English interface files from Tyrian v2.0 (I was just too lazy to do the Windows installation of the Tyrian 2000 1999 demo) for the fixed TYRIAN.PIC, I decided to double-check if there were any differences, and found one in the two-player arcade mode:


The sidebar and the bottom bar in the French version are noticeably darker than the ones in the fixed version. Further comparison revealed that the fixed version' colours in two-payer mode match the single-player interface colours, while French ones don't:



Also, there are dark brown pixels in the French version where the original English one has bright grey (e.g. at the top side of the shield meter), suggesting that the French version somehow got converted with a wrong palette. I checked the 1999 English demo (the free full release uses the same version of TYRIAN.PIC), and the colours there are also the same in two-player mode as in the French version: