Some Carmen Images

Well, we don't support Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego? yet beyond showing images. But we added support for the DOS images of Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego? Deluxe Edition yesterday, so I figured I'd show it off. Also, I don't update my blog enough, so here's a post.

Where Wile E. Coyote Shops

Police Squad! ...In 256 Colors

These are the same (well, similar) images from the intro of the two games. The former is in EGA from Deluxe and the latter in VGA from v2. They went full screen for Deluxe game and decided to size it down for Windows (The first image is actually three 640x160 images put together).

Surprisingly (or I guess I shouldn't be surprised considering how much Brøderbund likes to reuse things), the CSWorld Deluxe archive format is the same one used in Prince of Persia 2!

I cracked the archive format before I realized PoP2 used it, so I only found this info out afterward. Same with the simple SND resource format. I checked out the specs for the bitmap decompressor and applied a modified version to the ScummVM source (thanks to fuzzie for helping figure out the data was EGA planar). And lo and behold, it uses the exact same modified LZ decompression that was used in all other Mohawk games (minus Riven). It looks like the planar part isn't in PoP, but I'm not sure.

One last note: We will not support Prince of Persia 1/2 in ScummVM no matter how much you ask. ;)

Surprise Update #2

Poof again!

bgK has finished coding the Selenitic age for Myst! Feast upon the glory that is the best looking (IMO) and also the hardest (by far). I cannot be paid to solve the maze runner puzzle with all the bleeps, sweeps, and creeps (Yes, I just went there) so I don't blame you if you cheat on the maze runner. If anyone wants to try, they'll need to use the debug console and run "changeStack Selenitic 1282".

Screenshot time!

Does the door really need to close behind you?

Actually, this has always worked. I just like fire.

BRING ME THE PAGES

In Your Tunnel

Does anyone actually do this puzzle?

What hell truly looks like

Surprise Update #1

Poof!

fuzzie has done some great work on Living Books code for Mohawk in ScummVM and the games are very very very playable. Go try them out (along with our collection of near-infinite demos)! v1 games (the older, 512x384 ones) work near perfectly while the v3 games (640x480) have some new features that aren't fully supported yet. And now time for obligatory screenshots along with random semi-humorous subtitles provided by me.

A Way-Too-Happy Book

Fast Decaying Ham

Riding a Dog

Creeping Logo

Arturo, por favor

Eternal Third-Grade Punishment

Near Thanksgiving

Is this thing still on?

I have (sadly) neglected this blog for far too long. But, fear not! I am not dead (much)!

First off, the big kahuna. Riven is completable in the trunk. It actually has been for a while. I should have posted about it earlier... Ah well. It was a quiet night. August 31. I remember it as if it were only three months ago. At 11:47 PM, local time, I was able to complete the game in my local checkout without using the debug console (I did know the marble puzzle answer and Riven numerals previously, however). Soon after it became completable, I also implemented the marble puzzle itself.

Is it a big accomplishment? Probably. Is Riven supported now? Hell no. I still have to implement a few of the puzzles that help give you the marble puzzle solution and Riven numeral meanings. There's also some visual things that need to be done (which have no effect on the actual gameplay). There should be no major bugs in the game right now either, just missing features, which is a definite plus. Also, please don't submit bug reports yet!

Secondly, there is nothing else to report on. I found another SCI 1.1 Mac game (Hoyle 4) and did some other coding for stuff I can't really remember at this point. And I improved support for the Riven demo a bit so that the intro now plays when starting and you have the ability to hit that nice Exit button at the bottom of the screen.

Screenshot time!

Hot Demo Action

Some Fun with Marbles

"Care to join us?"

Tune in soon for some updates on currently in-progress Mohawk code (some of which isn't written by me!). Until next time... Shablagoo!!!!

Riven Easter Egg Plus

Well, I'm sure anyone that has played Riven has at least heard of the massive easter egg system that is in there. (Yes, this will work in ScummVM :P). I was checking some scripts in Riven because there are some other hotspots that will make the cursor disappear in the original game but weren't really attached to the easter egg. Richard Watson ("RAWA") even said that they weren't related to the easter egg. Well, it seems that they were originally going to be part of the game, but were cut out - and the scripts prove it.



The first of the hotspots, is the one above the cage. When clicking on the hotspot, this code runs:

switch (tdl) {
case 2:
    tdl = 3;
    break;
default:
    tdl = 0;
    break;
}

Unfortunately, all the other hotspots set tdl to 0, so the variable can never truly be set here. Not to mention tdl is also not set to 2 anywhere. (EDIT: See below)

Now for the Cho hotspots. It seems it was intended to have you click the hotspots in a specific order after tdl is set to 3 (from the above code segment). I have labeled them in the correct order here:



The hotspots labeled 1-6 will increase tdl by one if pressed in the right order. When you press the last hotspot, this segment of code is run:

switch (tdl) {
case 9:
    araw = 4;
    break;
}
tdl = 0;

araw is the variable used for the main Riven easter egg variable! aova is the other one. araw is normally set to 4 when you click the hotspot above the elevator on Garden Island:



So, it seems that this content was cut and replaced by the elevator hotspot. Or it could be that they changed the whole easter egg structure after having this initial "Cho code" in there.

(NOTE: The green/red rectangles are part of the hotspot debugging mode I added to the engine in ScummVM. Green = enabled, red = disabled)

EDIT: Well, turns out there's another piece of the puzzle. Clicking on the jammed lever outside of the cage in the beginning runs this code:

switch (tdl) {
case 1:
 tdl = 2;
 break;
default:
 tdl = 0;
 break;
}

Maybe there's a place where tdl is set to 1? The mystery continues!

Riven and Combinatorics

A short blog post today. I normally can't come up with something that's worthy of a full blog post anyway, so here's an attempt to post a bit more often. Take a look at this page which goes into detail of a lot of the combinations of puzzles in Riven. Gotta love that marble puzzle...

In the programming realm, I added support for drawing the dome combination and telescope combination in the lab journal and Catherine's journal, respectively. Screenshots of course!





Now you might say "But, clone, I can see where the numbers in Catherine's journal end and the page begins." Yes, you can. You also can in the original game. Nothing I can do to make it look better than what it does currently :P

And for those who are really interested and have forgotten the D'ni number system, the dome combo here is 2-6-16-18-22 and the telescope combination is 1-5-5-2-3.

EDIT: I forgot to mention that because Catherine's journal now displays the telescope combination, two more endings are now accessible from the beginning without using the debug console. \o/

"You've already got me, you lucky devil"

This blog post is a special one. Most of you know that SCI testing is going on already for all those boat loads of SCI games you have. That's for SCI0-SCI1.1, of course. I'm here to announce something different, though. No, not another LordHoto joke. No joke at all, actually!

I'm here to announce that GABRIEL KNIGHT: SINS OF THE FATHERS is completable in ScummVM. Not without bugs of course. And note that it will still NOT be tested in our current SCI testing nor be supported with the rest when they make it into a full release eventually.

EDIT: DrMcCoy has a quick trigger finger and found out that the hi-res (Windows) version is not completable. The DOS CD version is (and almost definitely the floppy version). This should be fixed now.

There are two major bugs with it still, but both are fixable if you use the fan made patches. In other words, both of these bugs were in the original game so they're not "our fault". You can download said patches from here. You'll want the NRS patches for either floppy or CD. There will be some other problems too. The save/restore menu is not working 100%, the text wrapping isn't correct, and transparency does not work yet. You'll see what I mean about the transparency if you get to use the flashlight or arrive at Schloss Ritter.

We do NOT want bugs submitted about Gabriel Knight, we know there's plenty of them still.

Also, please don't play Gabriel Knight if you still have other SCI0-SCI1.1 games to test. We really need you loyal ScummVM users concentrating on those. We love you guys! :D And thanks for all those SCI games you've already played through... and a seemingly neverending amount of bugs :P

Last August, SCI32 games weren't even startable and look how far we've come in just under a year!

Ah, and the obligatory screenshot. This was taken two days ago when I beat it for the first time. Yes, I missed 7 points. No idea where though...


PS - My apologies to pgr on #scummvm (IRC). We had decided not to reveal this, but changed our minds after discovering that the Day 5 lockup was indeed in the original too. It's also skippable using the spacebar. I'll be comparing both the good and bad scripts to add a workaround to the code for it soon. Hopefully I'll be able to figure out something clean ;) I hope you can forgive me! :)

Spit-Shined

The old "blue" theme was becoming old and dusty feeling. So, I've decided to use one of the new blogger templates. It's like stainless steel now. Not silver, I'm too cheap for that. OK, too poor for that. But you know what I'm getting at! Coming soon: "clone2727 Platinum" - where only followers who have purchased the "Clone2727's Blog Gold Package" can view the posts.

You can look forward to no other new changes and the occasional posting. That is all.

Also, if anyone dislikes the design (besides DrMcCoy), let me know! DrMcCoy will still be uploading those Halloween pictures somewhere. Thankfully, not here.

NOTE: This post was edited about 50 times, so if you see a different version, just laugh at my bad jokes there and move on. And yes, we do love DrMcCoy (Paid for by the Don't Force DrMcCoy to Work on Urban Runner Foundation™).

Return to Return to Zork

I revisited my Return to Zork work again this past week a bit. Mostly because my FM-Towns version arrived! :D It's been a while since I've looked at the game... have to go way back in the blog to find some posts about it.

I put the disc in as soon as I ripped open the package and looked at the files. To my surprise, ScummVM detected it immediately! It seems that we have a collision here... the rtzcd.red file has the same md5 of the first 5000 bytes and the same size as the English CD v1.0 version. Furthering my amazement, it turns out there's three other rtzcd.dat files on the disc (an rtzcd.dat is also in rtzcd.red). One in the base directory, one in the "RTZFM" directory and one in the "RTZ9821" directory. Turns out the one in the base directory is for DOS, RTZFM for FM-Towns and RTZ9821 for PC-98. Three-in-one, yay! I added the detection for all three.

The three versions all show up with messed up text. It seems to use the "KROM" file included on the disc for the font. I proceeded to install the DOS version using DOSBox. In some strange oddness, the game failed to find the two resource files: it was searching for the floppy names of the files. A quick rename and the game started up, though still failed to play the videos off the CD. The Japanese text does work there, so I'll have a chance to compare eventually.

All this RTZ stuff got me to pull my PlayStation version out again (Yes, I have 5 versions now: DOS, Mac, FM-Towns, PlayStation, and Saturn :P). The game currently errors out when starting up in ScummVM with failing to load the cursor bitmap. Couldn't make out too much of the format yet, but it seems to have 8 characters in the beginning with some sort of numerical text followed by possibly a uint32 size or offset.

Anyway, I got to looking at some of the other files on the disc (possibly again, I don't remember what I'd done in the past). There's a ZORKX.INF/ZORKX.XAI pair of files that contains the XA ADPCM audio (which we luckily support already!). The INF contains text entries of the filename and some numbers (tracks?) into the XAI. In the DISK1/DISK2 directories, There's the [dirname].INF and .STL files that are similar, except they contain PlayStation Stream videos.

In the MSG2/MSGJ folders, there's a bunch of TIM files and BS files. Hopefully no pun on the latter. The TIM's are standard PlayStation images. I know there's a bunch of tools out there for them already, but I wanted to write my own; it's simple enough. It can now be found here and supports both 4bpp and 16bpp TIM's. And my favorite of the converted pictures:

Are You Ready for the Summer?

Summer is just around the corner, though I've been off from Uni for over a month now (since my last post). So, what's been happening?

Continuing off my last post: SCI Mac. I began working on the KQ6 Mac icon bar interface. The picture below has a slightly off-centered position and slightly off-colored palette. The PICT code got moved from Mohawk to common code and was updated to allow for paletted images. The Mohawk QuickTime code was also moved to common code and updated to show the Cinepak-based movies. However, they don't show completely correctly due to "Cyan logo syndrome." Seeking support in QuickTime has a higher priority on my TODO list, so that comes first ;) I haven't made progress on other SCI1.1+ Mac games.

Mohawk. I fixed several bugs, such as the videos not showing when clicking on a stone in the rebel tunnel puzzle or when opening the cage in Gehn's office (not yet accessible from the beginning anyway). The boiler puzzle also got some fixes. There were a couple other minor fixes as well. Eugene changed some detector code to allow for detection through nested directories so Riven is playable directly off the DVD now (CD swapping will happen in the future :)).

SCI. Gabriel Knight is completable (albeit with extreme graphical glitches) up to trying to get inside Madame Cazanoux's house in Day 3 (door knocker not 'operatable'), thanks to various fixes from myself, md5, m_kiewitz, and Walter. Mostly (pun intended), that's all I've been working on in SCI. I've also promised myself to play one GK1 day each day (in DOSBox) starting tomorrow (June 18), meaning 17 years after the original game took place. Day 2 is clearly the best of the days.

That concludes this update. I'm looking forward to cheesecake on Saturday and Futurama next Thursday.

PS - Yay! (When sf.net stops throwing python exceptions)
PPS - Carmen Sandiego!
PPPS - In case you didn't get the title reference...

SCI Mac Craziness

Mac versions of SCI games started out fairly nice. SCI0/SCI1 games used the normal map/volume that their PC and Amiga counterparts used. That held true until the SCI1.1 releases.

Now, the game data is stored inside of Mac resource forks (which I have covered here before). My resource fork patch was accepted earlier this week, so I went into greater work for these games. It was pretty straightforward to get SCI's ResourceManager to support these. Mainly, it involved mapping the resource fork types to the SCI types. Nothing is ever that easy, however.

Right from the get go, it was pretty obvious that various resources were no longer all in little endian order, as had been the case with all other SCI games (even Amiga and pre-SCI1.1 Mac games). I wrote a wrapper function around the pointer reads so that it would choose the right one for the right platform/version. After some work, I got scripts to work and I saw the KQ6 title screen. Then came view support. Thanks to m_kiewitz, we figured out that some view fields were really uint32's instead of uint16's and then we had "preliminary" support for those. See the screenshot below. Also, messages were also in big endian order.

After stubbing off cursors (a view could not be found), the game was playable. There's a cursor in the screenshot, but that's because it shows the last cursor shown, which was the GUI cursor (now with the current cursor palette). However, the views didn't appear right... they could almost be made out. Fortunately, the sound format (MIDI/sequenced) is still the same and the GM mapping works well enough (the Mac/Amiga format is not supported yet). The audio (sampled) has been replaced by Mac 'snd' resources. They were easy to code, based off the Apple specs. On the bright side, font and picture resources are also the same as the normal DOS ones.

I also have Quest for Glory I Mac that I've been looking at, and it seems they may have compressed the scripts/heaps...

Anyway, here's a screenshot of my current code, obviously WIP:



EDIT: m_kiewitz cracked the Mac SCI1.1+ View compression, so we have that working now too. I also fixed cursors. It turns out that the cursors are stored in Mac CURS resources and the view that is called is a "dummy" view telling the engine to use the CURS resources instead.

The "Real" Version of Myst

After about 10 years of not owning it, I finally bought a copy of realMyst. The Macintosh version to be precise. Yes, I know it's on GoG, but I'm a tangible sort of guy and like holding the disc in my hand. Also, I don't want to tempt the Wine Gods who have so callously decided to infuriate me (Not the developers, they have put together a fabulous program. I think X11 on Mac OS X just sucks :P). So, I put it in my mostly reliable MacBook Pro and ran the installer. (Recap: MacBook Pro, June 2009, running Snow Leopard, Rosetta is installed.) Everything was going smooth until I tried running the application. It crashed immediately.

The next logical step was to run the application via the console. However this was no standard Mac OS X app. Running it would give the "cannot execute" error. Running "file" on it gave "header for PowerPC PEF executable." That is the old executable format used in previous versions of Mac OS as well as the early Mac OS X versions (10.0 and 10.1). Looking online, I found that there's an app called "LaunchCFMApp" that can launch the old PEF executables.

Of course, Murphy's Law dictates that this can't possibly work. And of course it didn't. It gave me an error: "Launch failed with error code -2856 (cfragRsrcForkErr)" -- that error means that the application can't find the resource fork. I checked the file, and the resource fork is clearly present. I then asked a friend for help. He was able to get it to run, but I still wasn't.

Searching a bit more on Google revealed that there was a 1.1.1 patch for the game. I installed that, and voila! I saw the "launcher" of sorts where I could choose graphics quality, resolution, and color depth. Nothing is ever that easy. Starting it would crash or just lead to a black screen. Until randomly it "just" worked. Probably something screwy going on in the background, but I'll take a functioning game. I was elated as I saw the SunSoft logo followed by the classic Cyan logo.

I proceeded to beat the game in under 5 minutes, as usual. :P

And now the obligatory screenshots:
EDIT: I also visited the new Rime age. The Riven image is a bit weird, not sure why. It's clearly Temple Island, though.

EDIT 2: Turns out LaunchCFMApp works fine in Snow Leopard as long as you feed it an absolute path and not a relative path. Seems the Resource Manager doesn't like relative paths anymore...

QuickTime Resource Forks

The HFS filesystem (and therefore HFS+ too) used by Mac OS and Mac OS X has two "forks" per file: the resource fork and the data fork. Of course, copying those files to non-HFS systems poses a problem. To make matters worse, QuickTime videos also came in versions split between the resource and the data forks! This complicated some things when copying those videos to a non-HFS drive and/or playing in anything but QuickTime player.

So, time for coding! I wrote a program back last November to combine the resource fork ('moov' chunk) and the data fork ('mdat' chunk) into one video file capable of being played everywhere QuickTime is supported. The code only works on Mac OS X (maybe OS 9, I have no means of testing that) for now (eventually I'll add support for the MacBinary format) and uses the data/resource forks directly.

Finally able to view Pegasus Prime videos on Windows... :)

Urban Runner Support: Postmortem

I'm sure you all saw ScummVM's April Fools' Day joke. It's been long enough since the last one (2007!) and last year's never really got anywhere.

This year, LordHoto and I were talking about it back in early February. He had an idea for one involving Urban Runner and DrMcCoy. Strangerke was quickly brought into the "group." LordHoto's grand plan was to plant images of Dr. McCoy into Urban Runner screenshots, which we all liked. He even wanted to make it of the reboot version of Dr. McCoy.

Then, while looking for some test images... I came to a realization. The actor portraying the new Dr. McCoy's name is Karl Urban! Brilliant!

That night, I quickly made the first two screenshots in Photoshop (to the approval of the other two). And then nothing happened again on it until March 30... I created the last two images (based on screenshots Strangerke made) that night.

Beyond our little April Fools' joke, I hope you all saw xkcd's console interface, YouTube's text mode, and the Monolith Action Figure.

And, for an April Fools' throwback, here are ScummVM's past ones:

• Dune 2 support
• Project Dragon
• CABAL (and its cancellation)
  

March Madness

I've been quite busy the last month, though sadly not much related to coding or reverse engineering.

In the ScummVM world, my main focus was working on rewriting the VideoDecoder system. In the current trunk, the VideoDecoder is limited in what it can be used for. It was designed for fixed-rate, 8bpp videos that do not run in the "background" (instead of say in Broken Sword where the cutscene is the only thing going on in the game and the event loop only handles the video) of the games. Because of the way this works, the QuickTime player in Mohawk does not use this (variable rate, >8bpp, and background videos needed) and I designed a different system to run the Myst and Riven videos.

DrMcCoy also had a similar problem with his Dark Seed II engine where >8bpp videos are used (in AVI files). So, I began working on a redesigned VideoDecoder system which took about a week's worth of my spare time up (with much help from DrMcCoy, especially on bug fixing and input on the new API) and we came up with this patch. Since writing the patch I haven't had time to fix some of the things in it or split it up (it's a whopping 130KB), but hopefully I'll get around to that soon. Also, the QuickTime code in Mohawk will eventually also be adapted to that and moved to common so it can be used in the SAGA and SCI engines.

Outside of the ScummVM world, I've done a bit more experimenting with my DOSBox + Windows 3.1 setup mentioned way back when. Now I'm running it at 640x480x24bpp using the S3 Trio drivers, and now Buried in Time doesn't crash on me at all and works in 24bpp. Buried in Time would be a great game to reimplement one of these, however it is entirely hardcoded and would be difficult to implement. The cursors and main menu graphics are stored in the executable too.

As for media, the audio is standard WAVE files (disguised with a .bta extension), the bitmaps are DIB's (disguised with a .btb extension, usually) and the videos are AVI's with Cinepak encoded frames (disguised with a .btv extension, usually). All of the data is normal, except for one image: TITLE/BKG.BTB. I wasn't able to open it in any image viewer, so I opened it in a hex editor only to see a very weird bitmap compression field: 'cvid' ('divc' when decoding because the field is really LE). Cinepak! I hacked together the Mohawk bitmap decoder and the Mohawk Cinepak decoder to display the image, and it came out fine. Apparently, the BKG.BTB file is displayed in the background so the main title video takes up much less room. Interesting, but again, a project that will probably never be realized because of its hardcodedness.

That's it for now... hopefully more posts soon. :)

Uru Live Again!

As you may or may not know, Uru Live opened to the public again on February 11 for the very high price of $0. It felt weird playing Uru again (not that I played Uru Live in the first place, except for a little bit :P). The cleft, and the main for ages of Uru were pretty much the same as the original. A lot came back to me as I played through them.

However, the Path of the Shell ages (Er'cana and Ahnonay for those keeping score) were a bit different. I ran through Ahnonay the same way as I did in the original... only to find myself not being able to rotate pods with the handle in the "hole in the wall." Turns out, they changed the way it's played to require two people...

A fellow ScummVM dev and myself set forth to help each other through the Path of the Shell here. We beat Ahnonay together and then helped each other yet again to find the way to K'veer Island (the island that Atrus is trapped in in Myst/Riven) and by extension, Myst. Here's Scott's and my avatars in Myst:


For what it's worth, my KI# is 590130 and my nick is, of course, clone2727.

Also, for those still keeping tabs on Riven progress, you can now go free Catherine (not that it's possible to get to the 233rd age yet anyway). Interested in trying? Use these console commands to plant you in Gehn's bedroom.

var agehn 4
changeStack ospit 81

Of course, you still have to make your way to Prison Island afterwards ;)

Snow Leopard Woes

Today I took out the Snow Leopard upgrade DVD that I've had for several months and installed it. I figured it was time for an upgrade.

Positives, positives... It didn't crash when installing... It probably is faster in some way. Ok, now for the negatives:

First thing I noticed: Had to recompile all the libraries. There was libSDL and libMAD present, but broken; or at least compiled for the wrong processor. Not to mention libFLAC and libMAD didn't recognize the host, so I had to force it to "x86_64-darwin". Other than that, the 4.2.1 gcc seems to be an improvement over 4.0.1 from the XCode that comes with 10.5.

Second thing: The definition of KB/MB/GB. I hate the 1000 bytes = 1 KB definition and the 1024 bytes = 1 KiB definition. I'm quite disappointed 10.6 now uses this definition.

And finally, the biggest problem: QuickTime X. To put it plainly, QuickTime X is complete crap. I can't believe Apple would release something like this. It is total trash. As when testing any video in a video player, I like to start with Myst's (the original!) Cyan logo video. First off, QuickTime X has almost no codec support; it has to call upon QuickTime 7 to play the videos. This already took about 10 seconds to load the video. Next problem: The video played at some ridiculously high resolution and wouldn't let me play it at normal size. In addition, the whole interface was ugly.

So, I'm looking around, and alas! QuickTime 7 has been pushed back to the Utilities folder. Following some other guys' advice in this post (of people who agree with me), I switched all QuickTime related files to be played with QuickTime 7. That's much better...

On a completely unrelated note: Background videos in Riven work now! Go watch the awesomeness that is the Tay linking book videos! So epic!

eBay Weirdness

Every once in a while, I check on eBay for a few games that I either find interesting, might help ScummVM in some way, or because I'm trying to track one down. I was looking for Mac versions of Sierra games, and at one point I happened to scroll down to the bottom of the screen and something caught my eye. "Leisure Suit Larry" (along with "Lego Batman") was mentioned on the bottom of the screen:


Bewildered as to what that link could possibly mean, I clicked on it and it lead me to here. Apparently Leisure Suit Larry is a popular item on eBay. Or something. I don't really get it. Not to mention none of the products listed below the description are even related to LSL.

</random blog post>

EDIT (2/3/10): My continued eBay searching has left me somewhat confused. Sometimes the item is just ridiculous, sometimes the price is just ridiculous. Since I don't want to just create another post, here are a few oddities I have found:

- King's Quest I CD: In addition to the high price... "replaced with the CD version"
- King's Quest V FM-Towns: High price. I would love to have it to be able to support it though! (Will accept a donation :P)
- Indiana Jones FM-Towns... Phone Card: Self-explanatory
- LucasArts Japanese Mac Pack: I would love to have this too (not as much as KQ5 FM-Towns), but I don't want to spend this kind of money...
- Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade: Seems normal... until you see what it comes with.

And, the icing on the cake:

- King's Quest VI "Girl in the Tower" CD: My jaw dropped when I saw this one. Yours probably will too. The price pretty much tells all. But it has free shipping!!!!


In other news, I've been tinkering with the Mohawk QuickTime code and working on adapting it to the Graphics::VideoDecoder interface in ScummVM. The more I do this, the more it feels like shoehorning the features that QTPlayer has into VideoDecoder isn't working. In addition, md5 mentioned that IHNM Mac uses QuickTime MIDI files. Curious as to what that involved, I looked up some samples on the internet. They use the good bad ol' QuickTime format to hold its own MIDI format (I had hoped for SMF in a QuickTime wrapper). Here's what Apple's QuickTime specs said about it. Anyone out there have better info than that?

The Year We Make Contact

And so, 2009 comes to a close. For those of you who have a good memory, you might remember a post I made last year about what I had hoped to accomplish this year. Let's take a look:

2009 Goals: (In order of probable completion)
- Fix Cinepak decoder!
- Fix QuickTime IMA ADPCM!
- Get background videos working!
- Figure out image format for other Mohawk games (Current hunch: LZSS similar to Myst format)!
- Finish Riven support (aka all the hardcoded puzzles :P)!

I have crossed out what was accomplished. Technically, I have a WIP patch that allows for background videos to work in Riven and background videos already work in Myst. So, we might consider that one done, even on a bit of a stretch. :P And now for next year:

2010 Goals: (In order of probable completion)
- Finish Riven support (external commands, mostly)
- Finish Myst support (some resource fixes, and then lots of the hardcoded opcodes)
- A look into other games more

Again setting lofty goals! We may even consider them monolithic in size! (Pun intended!) And for one last treat, to see the "good" ending of Riven, open the debug console in ScummVM (ctrl+d) and use these commands:

var ttelevalve 1
var ttelepin 1
var ttelecover 1
var pcage 2
changeStack tspit 137

Turn the lever down and press the button and voila! (Note: The DVD version may have to use a different card number, but just walk over to the telescope if you end up elsewhere :P)

Happy New Year! :)