"A.D. Cop": Doom's estranged rail-shooter cousin from Taiwan

[Revenant]

A long time ago (circa 1997), I had a CD with various multimedia-related software and drivers on it. Included on the CD was an extremely obscure game called "A.D. Cop: Overseas Mission", made by the equally unknown "Electronic Music and Animated Graphics Co., Ltd.", or EMAG. It's basically a made-in-Taiwan Virtua Cop clone for DOS.




Looks pretty 2.5D, doesn't it?

I later found out through some obscure abandonware site (I don't even remember where it is at this point) that "Overseas Mission" was actually a sequel/expansion/mission pack for the original A.D. Cop. Basically, two versions of the game with different levels, but the same pretty much everything else. There's a brief gameplay video of the original here, in Polish for some reason.

So what the hell does any of this have to do with Doom? If the stuff like "GAD file" and "ADCOP.GAD" in that screenshot up there caught your interest, then you can probably guess where I'm going with this.

Here's what you get when you change the first four bytes of ADCOP.GAD from "PACK" to "IWAD":



Yes, it's a WAD file containing, among all the other IWAD-type things, Doom maps with a bunch of exciting new lumps. Also, if you couldn't tell by the vehicles in the above screenshots, the maps also have slopes. Amusingly enough, I think the "NULTHING" lump at the beginning of every map is what prevented Doom Builder and SLumpEd from recognizing the maps, and I wouldn't be surprised if that was done deliberately on the part of the developers to try to deter owners of the game (all 5 of them) from tampering with the game using the myriad Doom editing tools that already existed by the time this game came out in 1997.

Being that the basic gameplay mechanics don't resemble any of the "real" Doom engine games at all, it's likely that the developers probably just wrote their own renderer while expanding on the Doom map format, likely to allow easier development without having to actually license the Doom engine (as I recall, it wouldn't be available under the GPL for a couple more years.)

As far as gameplay goes, it's not a bad game. It's no Time Crisis but I'd say it's fun enough to have deserved a little more exposure, at least as far as obscure budget games go. Try finding the original or the "expansion" via abandonware somewhere. I can upload them somewhere and link them since they're definitely not commercially available anymore, but I think I'll wait on that one for now.

So has anyone else here besides me heard about this game or this company before? I was rather baffled by how hard it is to find information online about either. I think the game provides a pretty interesting piece of obscure Doom-related trivia, if not a decent source to rip lots more 90s-as-hell textures from (it almost looks kind of like the poor man's Duke3D in that way, don't you think?) Of course it wouldn't surprise me to find out that a most or all of them are stolen from other 2.5D games, especially considering one of the STARTAN variants is in there.

Anyway, thanks for reading this really long thread about a game that barely exists. I'd just like to say a few parting words, courtesy of some of A.D. Cop's textures:



I think Mattbratt11 may have been responsible for some of these art assets.

Edited December 11, 2020 by Revenant

[pavera]

Awesome find, Rev. Judging by those screenshots, the guys who made it could have probably made for decent Doom mappers. Maybe we should get a community A.D Cop-themed wad project going now. :P

[lupinx-Kassman]

Well, SHIT.

[esselfortium]

Haha, awesome find!

Inside the game's data file I'm seeing lots of stuff that appears to be ripped/edited from Duke 3D, Doom, maybe Dark Forces I think, and probably some other places. Given how many rips I recognize I'm kind of doubting much of the rest is original content.

Also, for some reason the palette has 12 completely identical shades of blue right in a row. The rest of the palette is generally arranged like Doom's, but with the colors of each ramp changed around. It has about as many saturated greens as Doom has purples.

Also also, I keep wanting to call this game "Axe Cop".

[Daiyu_Xiaoxiang]

Fake version of Doom and Virtua Cop?

Things made in China do sucks.

[esselfortium]

I hacked up ADCOP.GAD a bunch until I was able to get Eternity to load the maps, albeit without any of the stuff from the billion and a half extra lumps (of course).

A few pictures: http://imgur.com/a/Gt5lQ

It evidently handles unpegging on midtextures differently than Doom does, because all the railings are stuck to the ceiling. The slopes are evidently defined in one of the custom lumps, rather than using a special line trigger like we're used to.

The colormap lump was badly screwed up and I just rebuilt a new one to get stuff to display properly.

[Gez]

I like how all the shadows converge in the scene with that strange warehouse/gazebo combo building.

[wildweasel]

Krispavera said:

Awesome find, Rev. Judging by those screenshots, the guys who made it could have probably made for decent Doom mappers. Maybe we should get a community A.D Cop-themed wad project going now. :P

I wholly support such an idea, if it means more urban-themed Doom levels. =P

[Maes]

Dammit, this "GAD" file extension rang several bells. It's not the first time I've seen it...makes me want rummage through my old shovelware CDs O_o

[Revenant]

Maes said:

Dammit, this "GAD" file extension rang several bells. It's not the first time I've seen it...makes me want rummage through my old shovelware CDs O_o

Go for it! Maybe you'll find some equally interesting crap.

Also, have some MIDI files! These were all in a separate WAD and had to be converted from XMI format. They're pretty cool, but I wonder how many of them are plagiarized.

Getting these games to work in DOSBox is kind of a hassle. My copy of "Overseas Mission" doesn't seem to want to work unless you run it directly off the CD, since the installer for DOS (there's one for Windows also, but it crashes in Vista) doesn't seem to be copying all of the files like it's supposed to. Copying the entire directory onto the hard drive and running it from there makes the game quit with "file not found" errors for some reason.

Also, I think my copy of the original "A.D. Cop" may be some kind of preview or demo version, since it's nearly 200 MB smaller and lacks the cutscenes seen in that Youtube video. Also I had to replace the .EXE with the one from Overseas Mission to actually get it to work at all, but it freezes part of the way into the mission selection screen for some reason. I downloaded it from "3D Shooter Legends" which has download links for both this version and a much larger ISO of the Polish version, which is presumably what the guy in that Youtube video was playing. However, both of the download links seem to be broken now.

[Memfis]

esselfortium said:

A few pictures: http://imgur.com/a/Gt5lQ

Cool, some of those remind me of Bespin maps from Jedi Knight 2.

[Gez]

Revenant said:

Also, have some MIDI files! These were all in a separate WAD and had to be converted from XMI format. They're pretty cool, but I wonder how many of them are plagiarized.

Apparently they were made by a (person? group?) named A4Tech.

[Lila Feuer]

Looks like ROTT meets Shadow Warrior.

[spank]

Where can I get this? Google search got me nowhere.

[NiuHaka]

This looks interesting... but I could never convince myself to play it. No way.

[jute]

Some of those maps look really nice. This is a great find. Are all the enemies generic black-suited guys, or is there more variety? Do they have rotations?

[<inactive>Player Lin]

Revenant said:

I downloaded it from "3D Shooter Legends" which has download links for both this version and a much larger ISO of the Polish version, which is presumably what the guy in that Youtube video was playing. However, both of the download links seem to be broken now.

Those links you mentions are works fine...at least in my end, just needed a lot of waiting time.
Ah, that site is a warez site so I guess it's not good idea talking it on here...

[Lorenzo]

Revenant said:

Here's what you get when you change the first four bytes of ADCOP.GAD from "PACK" to "IWAD":

I did this but XWE couldn't read it...

[Revenant]

What were you using to edit it? Make sure you were using something designed to edit binary files (i.e. a hex editor) as opposed to something like Notepad, otherwise there may be unintended side effects when you save the file.

[Lorenzo]

Revenant said:

What were you using to edit it? Make sure you were using something designed to edit binary files (i.e. a hex editor) as opposed to something like Notepad, otherwise there may be unintended side effects when you save the file.

Actually I was using notepad...

Ok, I'll try again with an hex editor.

Thank you!

[Sigvatr]

SHIT PISSER

[Lorenzo]

Sigvatr said:

SHIT PISSER

?

[Blastfrog]

Lorenzo said:

?

Check out the bottom two images in the OP.

[Lorenzo]

Oh yes, the pictures...

Well, after all the design of the level is not so bad and textures are interesting.

I suppose that using any of that material would be highly illegal...

[Use]

Lorenzo said:

I suppose that using any of that material would be highly illegal...

I'm pretty sure the whole game is illegal.

[Lorenzo]

Use3D said:

I'm pretty sure the whole game is illegal.

I wonder if they realised original maps or copied some old 1994esque doom level...

[Kappes Buur]

The maps are not especially detailed and look like 1994 style. To me it seems, that the game was unfinished.

But the resources are quite good. I might even use them in my own levels.

[Lorenzo]

Kappes Buur said:

The maps are not especially detailed and look like 1994 style. To me it seems, that the game was unfinished.

But the resources are quite good. I might even use them in my own levels.

I really like the container textures...

[Corak]

esselfortium said:

I hacked up ADCOP.GAD a bunch until I was able to get Eternity to load the maps, albeit without any of the stuff from the billion and a half extra lumps (of course).

A few pictures: http://imgur.com/a/Gt5lQ

It evidently handles unpegging on midtextures differently than Doom does, because all the railings are stuck to the ceiling. The slopes are evidently defined in one of the custom lumps, rather than using a special line trigger like we're used to.

The colormap lump was badly screwed up and I just rebuilt a new one to get stuff to display properly.

Do you still have that hacked .WAD (.GAD) from game to run on Eternity? Can you upload it somewhere?

[MLGari]

Friends I bring you all a fixed up GAD file that can play in any source port that's limit removing 

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1xPP2UL2SHm5hzBKBRq-yKOrjgm0O-O8H/view?usp=sharing