Star Wars Rebel Assault II Official Player's Guide by Jeff Hoff
The semi-official development targets used by both the Rebel I and Rebel II teams were:
Rebel Assault I (released November 1993)
16 color
backgrounds
4 channel mono sound
386 PC with 1x CDROM
Rebel Assault II (released November 1995)
256 color
backgrounds
10 channel stereo sound
486 50 MHz PC with 2x CDROM
On Rebel Assault I, a lot of the art and technical staff were using 486 60 MHz PCs. By Rebel Assault II, pretty much everyone was using Pentium 90 MHz PCs with 96 MB of RAM.
The pre-rendered video was delivered from the artists to the technical team in 24-bit Quicktime format in 320x200 resolution at 15 fps in cut lengths of generally 100 to 400 frames, though in some cases cuts of 800 to 1,000 frames were used.
The original datarate of each 24-bit Quicktime frame was about 1~ MB. After SMUSHing (LucasArt’s term for their proprietary compression codec at the time), frame size shrunk to about 14~ kb. One sequence that was about 28 MB in 24-bit shrunk to about 4 MB after SMUSHing.
The pre-rendered backgrounds were delivered from the artists to the technical team in 8-bit 256 color format, and were then reduced to 224 colors, because the first 16 and last 16 colors of the 256 color palette were reserved for Rebel Assault II’s user interface.
The Admiral Ackbar footage was taken from the Return of the Jedi laserdisc and cleaned up on a Macintosh using Adobe After Effects.