Clone2727's Blog

Reminiscing

2011-12-15T20:39:00.001-05:00

Well, hello there. Been a few months since I posted here. Figured I'd post about something, y'know.

Had a busy summer... busy fall too. Played a few games recently, including one classic game -- The Journeyman Project: Pegasus Prime. Let's reminisce a bit (WARNING: Contains spoilers; just skip to the very bottom for the good stuff).

The essential title screen; usually in most games. Let's move onto gameplay.

We should probably wake up, and not be late for work.

Too late! The commissioner doesn't look too happy. Also, bad temporal rip incoming and whatnot.

Time to go recover that log and not jump off the cliff though!

Avoid dinosaurs too, always good. Let's go to Mars instead.

Watch out! (Aside: For fun, you can try to attack this guy with any inventory item -- I bet you didn't know that!)

Freeze the lock, let's take a look at that bomb. Don't just pry it out though! Now, let's get out of here.

The maze isn't the same without the original music, but it's still enjoyable. Let's go catch that robot!

Bang bang! Pew pew! Now, tractor her in and board her!

Need to stop a robot down under too.

Being under the sea more to your liking? This guy doesn't seem to think you're much of a match for him, though. Probably should stay out of his way or maybe crush him or something.

I hope you don't need a map to solve this one.

Watch out! Robot on the loose!

Who needs lockpicks? Let's just blow the door open.

Why are there no tasers in the future?

How come James Bond never had to go through this level of difficulty when diffusing a bomb?

Mission Accomplished!

Well, that was a fun little aside don't you think! Talking about a classic adventure game randomly, just like that. Or was it really random? Maybe there's something common about those screenshots; no, not just in PNG format. They're all taken from within ScummVM. Yeah, you heard correctly. This is definitely happening, and I'll hopefully be done fairly soon. Ah, now you see what I'm getting at? There's still some graphical glitches with the videos, but it's in very good shape overall.

Oh and it's even completable.

More updates to come soon (And no, this code isn't on my github account yet, but will be soon).

And, of course, much thanks to Presto Studios for making all this possible and providing the original source code!

Mac SCI1.1+ Games Update

2011-06-17T02:09:00.004-04:00

I really should update here more :P

In an effort to catch up with stuff I've missed, I'll start by going over stuff I coded a few months ago. Remember last year when I wrote up two posts about SCI Mac code? Well, I don't. So, here's two links from last summer.

Back in probably February, waltervn and myself tackled the resource compression of the non-King's Quest VI SCI1.1+ Mac games. King's Quest VI wasn't good enough to receive the compression of the other games. Then we found out that they changed the sprite compression routine again (runs now a word instead of a byte) for QFG1 VGA Mac. The Mac versions of Hoyle Classic Card Games and Freddy Pharkas became playable too, especially after waltervn put in a bunch of work on the hardcoded menu bar of KQ6 and Freddy Mac (though, still not complete).

One of the problems we found with these Mac games is that they have their black and white palette indexes reversed from normal SCI (black = 0x00, white = 0xff). Why? Because on classic Mac OS, white is always at 0x00 and black is always at 0xff. Our solution was to swap black and white pixels so that our palette code from the DOS versions would still work and would keep the complexity down.

Then, I took a look at the SCI2.1 Mac situation (GK1 Mac is SCI2.1 instead of SCI2 like the DOS version). The four SCI1.1 Mac games began to switch various resources to store multi-byte values in big endian order instead of the little endian order of their DOS counterparts. Starting with GK1, Sierra began to, as I like to put it, "big-endian-ify" the remaining resources. I also added support for the high-res GK1 Mac fonts that the DOS version doesn't have. It currently is probably on the same page of support as the DOS version (minus the sound driver and one skippable timing bug in the Day 1 intro). Gabriel Knight 2 Mac also has some small amount of support, but with some more weird transparency issues. The later SCI2.1 Mac games have some Sound class changes (the SCI class, that is) that causes games like Phantasmagoria to not start without a couple hacks.

Going back even further, there's three SCI0 Mac games that we don't support yet either: Space Quest III, Hoyle's Book of Games I and Hoyle's Book of Games II. These three are special in that they run in a higher resolution than the usual 320x200 and have high-res views.

And now for some screenshots:

Clicking on the KQ6 menu

Looked at that awesome greyed out effect!

GK1 high-res fonts = awesome

Yeah, it's Mostly working (I am the king of lame puns)

Just Some Code Lying Around...

2011-02-21T18:47:00.005-05:00

Well, as promised by yesterday's post, I would come back with some more code. Oh look! There's two new branches on my fork of ScummVM.

First off, is jmp, which was supposed to be an engine for the Windows versions of The Journeyman Project (Turbo!) and its sequel, Buried in Time. However, other than an AVI player (KQ6 put this code to good use), not much was of use until recently when I added support for loading resources from the EXE/DLL. Both games are entirely hardcoded. Still not much is done, but it's got some good code in there for the Cinepak-based bitmaps I mentioned on my blog before. The codebase here dates back to 2006, so be gentle with it.

Probably the more important of the branches, at least to me, is pegasus. Unlike their predecessors, The Journeyman Project: Pegasus Prime (Mac only) is not hardcoded (minus some 'minigames'). It seemed like a better candidate to me. Well, it's a bit more functional than the others but still not much is done. You can traverse the menus a bit and the intro plays (with that recently-added QuickTime seeking), but not much else can be done yet. And thanks to a fellow fan's research, some of the resource types are also loaded in (but not all). I intend to continue on this when I'm done with Mohawk (at least the "core" Mohawk games :P).

It feels good to get this all off my chest. Have I mentioned how much I love git?

Git 'er done

2011-02-20T13:06:00.002-05:00

Now that ScummVM has moved to git, I figured I would do a couple things with a fork of the project. I love git so far!

First off, I brought my Rebel Assault changes mentioned recently to a fork called ra-smush. I also got audio (mostly) working in it (there's a slightly different SAUD frame header). No, don't even think about asking support for it in ScummVM!

Secondly, my old Star Trek engine (for 25th Anniversary and Judgment Rites) has found its way into another fork.

And maybe there will be more forks soon.......

Monkey Island FM-Towns for Sale

2011-02-15T01:37:00.004-05:00

...at the low low price of $1200! Even Zak isn't going for that much. You know a game is expensive when it's for sale at double the price of Zak McKracken FM-Towns.

But, hey, look on the bright side: there's free shipping.

And now back to our irregularly scheduled program.

Riven iOS

2011-01-29T17:04:00.003-05:00

My father wanted to buy Riven iOS for his iPod Touch, so I figured I'd take a quick look at it. The game itself seems to work well, but the videos are a bit jittery. Now onto the more important part: A look at the data files.

No, I'm not going to reimplement this engine. But at least this would be a good starting point for anyone who wants to.

It was pretty easy to figure out everything that was going on immediately. Ron Hayter already updated his Riveal tool to extract the images from the game. So, here's pretty much what's going on with those formats:

Images
PNG in the main directory and in zip files with the stack name in it, for example: "aspitimages" is the zip file holding images for aspit, also known as the main menu.

Sounds
CoreAudio Format in the main directory.

Movies
MPEG-4 with h.264 video and AAC audio.

Scripts
Now, here's the interesting part. The scripts are all in a SQlite database (version 3). They're also named by the stack, such as "aspitdb" for the scripts for the main menu. The actual scripts seem to be all in strings, probably based on the original HyperCard source (which was never released). I matched up some script segments for a comparison:

Riven iOS Script
Riven Win/Mac Script (dumped using ScummVM)

The card scripts start with the script type. The hotspots have the name followed by the rect followed by their scripts. It's pretty much the same setup as CARD/HSPT in the Win/Mac version.

Miscellaneous Observations
The entire main menu seems to have been converted, but is unused. Anyone who finds a debug mode in the app and goes to the original setup page gets a cookie from me.

The Riven Easter Egg Shortcut

2011-01-23T00:58:00.000-05:00

Hopefully the couple readers I have remember a post I did back in August entitled Riven Easter Egg Plus. For those who don't, it was about there being some script fragments on how to shortcut the full Riven easter egg.

Tonight, I present to you the full version of that shortcut. There is a trick to doing it and the game itself will try to block you at various occasions (disabling the shortcut just because you turned one way by accident). Oh yes, with the original interpreter as well. So, here's my best attempt at explaining this. You should *not* click on any red-shaded areas.

1) After the intro videos, walk over to the handle and click it *one* time.

2) Turn around to the cage (avoiding red spots) and look up. Then click the star on top of the helmet *one* time.

3) Turn right from the helmet and avoid red hotspots to walk over to Cho.

4) Click the hotspots on Cho in this order:

At this point, you have just taken a shortcut through the first four parts of the Riven easter egg. The last part is to go press the RAWA hotspot over by the maglev.

Yes, that's right. You can get the entire easter egg setup from the beginning without ever leaving Temple Island. So what are you waiting for? Go try it out! :)

Riven Update

2011-01-11T15:12:00.003-05:00

Been a while, but here's a Riven update! Today, I finally finished QuickTime seeking support, so I quickly jumped at the opportunity to implement another puzzle, and here are the results:

This is how I envision my death

Need some aspirin?

Also, the telescope actually moves now instead of just jumping from place to place. Stay tuned for more updates soon, hopefully, maybe!

Feeling Rebellious

2011-01-11T15:03:00.005-05:00

Out of boredom the other day, I decided to play around with ScummVM's SMUSH player and see if it could be "convinced" into playing some Rebel Assault videos (not Rebel Assault II, that's basically already there).

These version 1 videos are very similar to their version 2 brethren (Rebel Assault II, The Dig, Full Throttle, etc.), but have some differences. The delta palette code is different, providing fewer entries (smaller color sizes?). Audio and text seem to be handled differently as well. At least the audio flags are different. There's also a 'PVOC' chunk that probably deals with audio and a 'GAME' chunk that I can only speculate what it's for. Of course, I completely ignored the 'IACT' (interactive, for the INSANE code).

So, minus audio, text, and palette changes, I was able to render a couple frames. A couple at any rate. Without further ado:

The cutscene after the hardest level in the game. Seriously, who makes a level that hard and difficult to navigate? Damn Kolaador...

Now someone should go implement the game (not in ScummVM)!

Some Carmen Images

2010-12-15T09:44:00.006-05:00

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

2010-11-29T17:23:00.004-05:00

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

2010-11-28T20:47:00.000-05:00

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

2010-11-22T16:08:00.006-05:00

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

2010-08-23T10:40:00.008-04:00

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

2010-08-22T00:12:00.007-04:00

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"

2010-08-01T20:00:00.010-04:00

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

2010-07-19T14:33:00.014-04:00

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

2010-07-18T23:05:00.006-04:00

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?

2010-06-17T22:50:00.007-04:00

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

2010-05-12T19:15:00.007-04:00

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

2010-04-24T00:11:00.007-04:00

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

2010-04-02T23:44:00.001-04:00

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

2010-04-01T22:32:00.001-04:00

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:

March Madness

2010-03-27T19:55:00.004-04:00

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!

2010-02-18T14:45:00.001-05:00

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

2010-02-14T20:56:00.005-05:00

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

2010-01-28T02:35:00.006-05:00

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

2010-01-01T00:52:00.001-05:00

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! :)

The End

2009-12-29T23:00:00.002-05:00

Today, December 29, 2009 at 23:23:31 (UTC), Mohawk entered the main ScummVM tree. You can now go grab a daily build and try out Myst or Riven. And now Strangerke can make his own gameplay videos and not coerce me into making them. :P

So, this is the end. Mohawk is now in the trunk and everyone can attempt to play Myst and Riven in ScummVM. :)

Or, perhaps the ending has not yet been written...

Sync'd (aka December Update)

2009-12-20T19:34:00.005-05:00

After about a year of work, videos finally work and now with full a/v sync (md5 suggested something that could be the problem and that was it). Of course it was about a five line fix, but that's the not the point. ;)

Mohawk progress in the past month, let's see... I don't really remember a lot of it. I've spent most of my time on Uni things. It's now break, so it's time to work on more! digitall has been working on QDesign Music 2 (a complex audio codec used in Myst ME) and then we've taken an early look into the Living Books games. Nothing playable yet, but we can parse the "book outline" files.

I'm sure there's more I've forgotten, but I'll give a quick wrap-up:

Myst: Playable
- Many graphical glitches
- Wrongly disabled hotspots
- Only Stoneship is accessible from Myst Island
- D'ni is accessible! Can't hand a page over though :P

Myst ME: Slightly less playable than Myst (inherits the same problems)
- Less videos work
- Probably some PICT problems that have yet to be encountered

Riven: Very playable
- Almost no status update since last time :P
- Fixed one minor regression from cleanup

Myst is movin' right along now! Unfortunately, both Myst and Riven have hardcoded puzzles which are the biggest impediment in progressing further. But fear not, they will be worked on!

Legacy of Time 10th Anniversary

2009-11-08T13:23:00.004-05:00

Earlier this year, Tommy Yune, conceptual artist on most of the Journeyman Project series posted on his Journeyman Project blog that Presto Studios would be re-releasing Legacy of Time for Mac OS X as a 10th Anniversary Special Edition. This was put on hold after the evil QuickTime 7.6/7.6.1 bugs that caused Cinepak videos to not display properly.

On October 30, the game was available to order. I ordered as soon as I possibly could. And, it came yesterday. I played as normal, and as usual, pretty much everything came back to me about playing the game (I'm not done yet, but I did find two parts of the legacy already!).

One of the interviews mentioned there was a new easter egg in the game. It obviously caught my attention. Now, instead of looking through the game for the new one, I set off looking at the data files. Most of the files seem the same from the original PC DVD version (from 1998), but some of the dates are different. For instance, the final cutscene has a date from January of this year, so it was probably modified a bit.

Then, I was looking through some of the El Dorado videos, and lo and behold, a video had a date from 3/13/08. It has been touched since the original release! Looking at it, it's the video with the pool animations (EP/EPanim.mov). At the end of the video is the new easter egg involving a whack-a-rat type joke with the idol heads around the pedestal with the legacy. I haven't figured out how to trigger it in game yet, but that is the next step.

Also, while the interviews seem to suggest improved graphics, the files all have the same 6/25/1998 date (minus those couple videos, unless I missed some), so the files all have the original DVD release's graphics and they haven't been updated since then.

Easter eggs cannot hide from me! :P

The ScummVM Logo: A Lookback

2009-11-06T14:29:00.005-05:00

If you didn't notice, ScummVM has an updated logo. So, in honor of that (even though it's a week late), I've taken the liberty of compiling all the ScummVM logos throughout history. Much thanks to archive.org. I just thought it was interesting how far it has evolved. Of course, I came much later and missed out on the old logos... (And, does anyone remember that first one?)

Ancient (2001):

Early 2002: (Website Redesign)

Late 2002:

Late 2005: (Website Redesign)

Late 2009: (Capitalization)

November Already!

2009-11-04T21:59:00.007-05:00

Here we are. November. And when was the last blog post? A month and half ago? Bah! It's been too long!

Riven has improved a lot. Loads of hardcoded functions have been filled in, it's slowly becoming more completable. The marble puzzle is just bypassed currently because I haven't gotten around to its logic. So, you can now get up to trying to access one of the lesser domes. And, if you use the debug console, the game is actually completable. Whaddya know?!? Some other bugs (including another QuickTime scaling bug! Egad!) were fixed.

That's great and all. But, really, the biggest piece of progress has been in Myst. Around the time of my last post, a new developer came forward (digitall) and has been working on various portions of Myst bringing it up to a highly playable state. Myst is now explorable and Stoneship is also accessible from the start. Screenshots? Of course! Videos? No!

QuickTime Hell

2009-09-16T01:55:00.008-04:00

I hate QuickTime videos. They really are over-engineered. In good news, I have conquered most bugs in our player (mostly based off the ffmpeg player, thank you so much!) but there are still several evil ones left. The last of these screenshots will show the main bug left:

The first three are from the Cyan logo video, the main intro video on D'ni, and then Cho greeting you on Riven (before his timely demise). The last is the door to the temple. Yes, that's a bug. Or, rather an unhandled feature of QuickTime videos (it's in ffmpeg, just not in ours :P) that requires us to cut the width and height by 2. Only a few movies have this, and I'm not sure why. It doesn't make sense to me to even double the resolution in the first place, but alas, it's on the TODO list now. As are the "background" videos which will probably be handled next (they're partially supported now, just need to hook in a few function calls and cut out some screen updates). Not to mention the a/v sync problem still. And, yes, gameplay videos will be coming, just please don't bug me about it now.

EDIT: Fixed the double-resolution stuff (and 4x res stuff too... stupid QuickTime...):

For those interested, the problem was in the display matrix (in the tkhd atom) we didn't handle previously.

Boldly Going

2009-09-12T16:15:00.003-04:00

Taking a break from my usual Myst/Riven/Mohawk posts, this one will be different. Back in November of 2008, I took a brief look into the engine behind Star Trek: 25th Anniversary and Star Trek: Judgment Rites. Most of the work was based off of the Xentax Wiki information (as well as other pages on the site). Before long, I had the basic file parser going and then followed by images. I even went to support the MIDI sound and figured out the font format of the PC version before moving onto writing code for the file format of the Amiga and Macintosh formats (which really weren't all that different).

However, I didn't really want to continue to work on it after finding out that the game had some heavily hardcoded parts. And, it just sat on my hard drive for many months... until now. I'm putting the code that I have (slightly cleaned up today and made to compile with the current ScummVM trunk) onto a new Google Code repository. I hope that someone will want to take up the project and continue it to completion. I don't have any plans to work on it myself, currently. If any ScummVM forum dweller remembers, there was a brief mention of another ScummVM engine for the games back in June of this year. As far as I know, nothing ever came out of it. If anything did, I'm sure that probably some of my code could be salvaged if only for the Mac/Amiga code.

Zip-a-Dee-Doo-Dah

2009-09-12T01:31:00.001-04:00

Any of you out there who have played Myst or Riven know that the only thing that could possibly relate to that title in those games is Zip Mode.... which is now supported in Riven in the engine. :)

As for videos, I *did* make an attempt to make some yesterday. I actually made one, and then the program for capturing crashed on me when saving. I even beat the "Rebel Tunnel Puzzle" from memory. If anyone out there knows of a good program for capturing video on Mac OS X, leave a note in the comments. :P

Continuing Updates

2009-09-08T02:01:00.001-04:00

After a long time coming, the Myst demo has finally been located and secured. I found it on a CD-ROM Today demo disc from July, 1994. Talk about a blast from the past. I quickly started it up in Mohawk (after fiddling around with the fs stuff on the hybrid disc on OS X). The game is about as playable as the full version of Myst. You can access the menu and click on things before an error, while the full version just doesn't do anything to leave the intro. :P

Interesting that it hadn't been found earlier. I had been searching for almost two years for the demo. The Riven demo I found was on the SoftKey release of the Prince of Persia Collector's Edition. Seems Broderbund/Red Orb like to hide their demos fairly well (On a side note, reverse the first six letters of Broderbund for a neat trick :P).

Are you still looking for a Riven gameplay video (*coughStrangerkecough*)? Well.... there is none, because this is all part of

More of a Real Update (Kind of)

2009-08-30T23:14:00.005-04:00

Seems everyone is expecting more updates from me, so here's a better one than the last one (which, if you didn't realize, was more of a joke than anything to spite Strangerke who has been pestering me for more blog updates. Besides, we should pester DrMcCoy who hasn't posted in two and a half months :P).

So, here goes. The last post showed off the main things that I had worked on in Mohawk for the past month-ish. Video is still getting better, sync slightly improved (works near perfectly in Myst, worse in Riven) and improved streaming of audio from QuickTime videos. The sync gets worse the longer the video is, but I have a solution to it that I will be implementing soon. Note that only Riven's intro videos currently play, there's still problems with other ones. Riven is indeed playable up to the marble puzzle, which as you might know, is one of the more complex puzzles in the game. I had a script parsing bug left in Riven since who knows when that I finally fixed and finally finished the boiler puzzle. It has so far been just a huge annoyance in working on the game. Hopefully, I won't have as much grief with the marble puzzle.... :P

Indeed the Making of Myst is supported. It's not much of a game, but it has some of the basics of the Myst flavor (yes, ST, flavor!) of Mohawk. It uses one resource/hotspot to show the video, which is now handled. Myst still is not playable beyond the intro.

Hopefully, if you've noticed the trunk, I also had a little SCI action going. Namely (very very very) early SCI32 support at the begging of DrMcCoy (who still hasn't fixed the Urban Runner bug!). I also added AVI/MSVideo1 support to the Windows version of SCI (specifically KQ6 in this case). The actual player I wrote for a dead-ish project/engine of mine that I started a while back, but never got off the ground due to it being completely hardcoded (as opposed to Riven's more complex puzzles only being hardcoded). Maybe after Mohawk (and other things) I'll get back to it. Riven is still my priority, don't worry! It was nice to take a short break and look at an engine that has next to no hardcoded-ness for once. In case you were wondering about SCI32's status, there really is nothing to report. At least GK1 and Torin start their scripts before having a crash with something or other (due to kernel functions not being implemented).

As promised for months and months and months, there will be a new gameplay video. I hope to get it up on YouTube on TUESDAY, so stop bugging me about it! :P

Update for Strangerke

2009-08-25T18:30:00.002-04:00

Strangerke has demanded an update from me, so here it is. I fixed some Riven bugs and now the boiler puzzle is completable. The game is playable until the marble puzzle. Added support for changing Myst cursors and the Making of Myst. There were also various video fixes and support for audio support in Riven videos. Riven now shows the intro videos (though slightly out-of-sync). Expect gameplay videos soon.

That is all for now. :P

Taking Inventory

2009-07-29T22:40:00.005-04:00

As of yesterday, Riven has full inventory support. Yes, that means you can access Atrus' Journal, Catherine's Journal, and the trap book. Yes, that also means that the first "end" to the game is now accessible. The first two actually. You can now die by using the trap book on Riven or on Tay. Two out of like 20. Not bad.

Images of course!

Spanning the Globe

2009-07-26T18:40:00.005-04:00

After some work, I've gotten images in various other games (besides Myst and Riven) to display properly in Mohawk. Here's a little teaser of what I've been working on:

Hopefully, someone will recognize that image from "Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego?" It's the main interface at the bottom of the screen. Any transparency is represented by black right now. Of course, none of the other games are playable yet, but this opens the door for working on the other games. But, there's still lots of Myst and Riven stuff to do ;)

Myst in Windows 3.1/DOSBox

2009-07-03T21:26:00.003-04:00

After yesterday's post, I obviously had to test Myst as well. Especially since that's what I'm working on (partially, at least :P). Using the same setup as yesterday, I began to install the application which installed smoothly. QuickTime, on the other hand, was not as cooperative. Apparently, someone else had my problem and I used the same solution to use the alternative QuickTime installer. Myst started up, and it worked perfectly. Beyond perfectly, really. I couldn't find one problem with the game. Everything just worked. The game is completable too. I've commemorated this with an image and a video.

The image was taken at exactly that time too (locally). Where's that constellation? :P

I also have been working on Myst more. I've experimented with some hotspots and the results are coming along. And I fixed some script parser bugs. Clicking on the book in the first screen actually works now. ;) More posts to come soon, hopefully...

The Inaugural Game

2009-07-02T22:25:00.006-04:00

Today I bought a new MacBook Pro (13", the cheapest one). It was desperately needed. And for anyone who's followed my blog for a while, you'll know how badly the previous laptop sucked. Well, it didn't suck, it just was nearing the end of its time and I kept fixing it to keep it alive.

Anyway, as I do with all new computers I get, I always put on the "inaugural game" onto the computer to christen it, so to speak. The game is always Buried in Time, one of my favorite games. However, having an Intel Mac, running this game would not be an easy task. The Intel Macs don't support < Mac OS X anymore and it obviously doesn't support any Windows thing. Now, I could have gone about this in many ways (such as VirtualBox or WINE), but instead, I chose to use DOSBox + Windows 3.11.

Windows 3.11 installs easily under DOSBox. It was simple to put the CD in and then just install. However, I had to mess around a bit for graphics. I used Windows' SVGA driver (640x480x256 colors) and then for DOSBox set the machine type to "svga_et4000" and it worked like a charm. I installed the SB16 drivers for Windows and then sound worked too. Besides a crash that happens when watching the credits video (with the title and whatnot), the game runs but a with a slight lag. Especially with screen updates. You'll see what I mean with this video:

I'll also get to try Myst and dithering under this setup now too. That's the next step ;)

Mohawk in 16bpp

2009-06-28T21:48:00.007-04:00

Since Jody's 16bpp branch is really taking form now and the API is pretty much all there, I figured it was time to take a shot at Riven in 16bpp. After only a few minutes, I was able to convert Riven to using the new API. I'll give you a few comparison shots.

First, we have this lovely shot in the village on jungle island overlooking the lake. Note the lovely submarine in the upper right as well as the dock on the other side.

*waves the 16bpp wand*

And one more. This time of the submarine before you lower it. Note the malformed colors on both the submarine and the handle.

*does some more magic*

Now that's much better. The difference is quite apparent. Also, notice how the bottom is all black now. The black index in all the palettes differs. Not only that, but I would have to remap the images of the inventory on every card swap. The original game didn't work in 8bpp mode anyway, only 24bpp. 16bpp is good enough for now.

This is really only an experiment currently. But soon enough, it will pave the way for videos and the inventory. More posts soon, including that video I promised.

June Update!

2009-06-06T15:45:00.002-04:00

Welcome to June!

I have been working on Mohawk the last week and have, most importantly, fixed some video bugs. I killed off a video-related segfault and (finally) fixed Cinepak's color. I'll have some videos up later in the week showcasing Mohawk's ability to (ab)use the Overlay to play a Cinepak video :P

I also had some Myst fixes, though it doesn't make the game more playable or anything. I shall be working on Mohawk more this week and then probably not again until July (lots of stuff to do and vacation). We'll see how much I get done :P

Riven will once again be the focus of my efforts. Though, Myst and RTZ PSX will be temptations to look at :P

Oh, and make sure you buy Tales of Monkey Island. I know I will! :P

Iconic Mohawk Image

2009-05-12T16:26:00.002-04:00

Looking at the datafiles for the Mac portion of the Green Eggs and Ham disc, some of the Mohawk files have a cute little icon attached to them. Of course, it's of a guy with a Mohawk :P

(Image Copyright Broderbund, I'm guessing :P)

Mohawk Recap

2009-05-05T16:42:00.005-04:00

Holy Cherokee, Batman! It's two days in a row with posts!

This is pretty much a follow-up to the Mohawk Galore! post from last year. Since that, I've discovered a couple more (which I forget if I mentioned or not) and I know of several others that are very likely to use it. So, in summary, here is a recap of all the games.

Definitely Mohawk
- Myst (Windows version)
- Riven (Windows and Macintosh versions)
- Myst: Masterpiece Edition
- Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego?
- Where in the USA is Carmen Sandiego? (The Great Amtrak Train Adventure)
- Green Eggs and Ham
- In the 1st Degree
- Logical Journey of the Zoombinis
- Maggie's Farmyard Adventure
- James Discovers Math
- James Explores Math
- The Treehouse

Likely/Known to Be Mohawk
- Koala Lumpur: Journey to the Edge
- Math Workshop Deluxe
- Where in Time is Carmen Sandiego?
- Where in the USA is Carmen Sandiego?
- Carmen Sandiego Junior Detective
- Carmen Sandiego Math Detective
- Carmen Sandiego Word Detective
- Various other Living Books

Not Mohawk
- Myst (Macintosh, Amiga, Console/Handheld versions)
- Riven (PlayStation, Sega Saturn)
- RealMyst
- Any other Myst sequel
- Any Carmen Sandiego game not on Windows/Macintosh
- Any game created by The Learning Company (after buying Broderbund's property)

And, one last sum up. What works so far:

Myst:
- Pictures, Sound, Basic Card/Hotspot Support, Early Video Support, Cursors. The opening scene works.

Myst ME:
- Same as Myst, with less Picture support. The opening scene works, minus a background image.

Riven:
- Pictures, Sounds, etc. Pretty much everything minus videos and various hardcoded puzzles. The game is completable up until the boiler puzzle and you are able to retrieve the trap book from Tay.

All Other Games:
- Sounds, Early Video Support, MIDI. Some basic structure is known for its pictures and other resources.

MDo May Update

2009-05-04T22:40:00.004-04:00

I can't believe it's May already. April flew by, with almost no progress made.

But, fear not! I did work on Mohawk a little. I've fixed the problem with Riven videos. It turns their offsets were based on the entire Mohawk archive and not the video itself. Wasted about 2 hours trying to figure that one out. In addition to some other minor cleanup, I implemented playing of the tMID resource which is just a simple SMF MIDI file with some extra data. In this case it has a Mohawk Header (MHWK+MIDI), then the standard MThd chunk. Beyond that is the unknown Prg# chunk and the standard MTrk chunk. It sounds pretty good when played. :) The tMID resource isn't used in Myst/Riven, however.

If you didn't get the joke in the title, it was recently confirmed that the "real" name of the Gob engine is MDo. Hopefully no one will hurt me for this joke. :P

And hopefully for next month (which is probably when I'll write the next post) I'll have some more exciting news. Like full Riven support or something. Not likely. :P Hopefully some new games, though. And maybe more videos :D

Featured!

2009-04-11T12:09:00.003-04:00

I open up a tab to Wikipedia today... and lo and behold! Riven is today's featured article! Awesome! :D

The April Fool's That Never Was

2009-04-01T22:58:00.003-04:00

Yeah, the ScummVM April Fool's Joke didn't really materialize this year. I had began work on one, in which ScummVM renamed to CABAL again now that Sarien and FreeSCI had been merged in. I made a patch which changed all references on the website from ScummVM to CABAL and Residual to CABAL3D. Sadly, I never got around to working on a logo which prevented it from being put into action. I blame real life and LordHoto. :P Here are some shots of what might have happened:

March Update

2009-03-27T06:11:00.002-04:00

I've worked on Riven a bit this month. Not many new features, however. There are some updates to the previously unknown opcodes and I've added support for the 1.02 patch which I had never heard of until last week. I mean, I definitely beat the game with my 1.0 version... :P There have also been loads of memory leak fixes. And I have several more to fix. No progress on video, however.

For, something completely random, watch this. There's a hidden tentacle sprite from Day of the Tentacle in Dark Forces. The video isn't that long, but it shows the tentacle's animation. I'll try to upload a patch of secbase.o soon. I haven't played Day of the Tentacle in a while, but I think it's the tentacle walking animation. Also, isn't it strange that YouTube is accepting and converting my ZMBV videos... (ffmpeg perhaps?)

The Good, The Bad and The Ugly

2009-03-04T09:04:00.004-05:00

The Good
The Bad
The Ugly

Yeah, that last one is ugly, but it can still be found for a bargain. Not as good as the $15 bargain I got 6 years ago, but still good ;)

In other news, I haven't done much again except for fixing some video bugs.

Video, Video, Video

2009-02-04T21:11:00.005-05:00

So, I've worked much more on Mohawk the past week and a half, and I've added some new features and squashed some bugs. I cannot crash Riven anymore. :P (In addition to all the good Indy news... not the new game! Fate of Atlantis on Wii! :P)

I've also added support for the "water effect" of Riven, so it adds a cool touch to the background. The Rebel Tunnel puzzle is also beatable, meaning you can visit the rebel age (aka Tay). ;)

Today, I also worked on the videos again, and I pulled something off! See here for yourself!

As an extra bonus, here's a video of Riven too!

New Logic Board

2009-01-29T20:43:00.002-05:00

After months of hiatus, I finally bought the new logic board needed for "the laptop." I'm posting from it! Took long enough! :P

The Book Press Is Not Dead!

2009-01-28T15:29:00.007-05:00

As it has been known for some time, the book press from Book Assembly Island in Riven was removed from the game after the beta version. It was also known that two videos (previously visible with Riven Movie Snoop) . (See here and here).

If you use Ron Hayter's excellent Riveal program, you can extract the movies, sounds, and pictures of Riven (both CD and DVD). I did that a while ago, and I look at the images (whose names start with the card they are used in) to help debug the code from time to time. Today, I was working on Gehn's journal in his lab on Book Assembly Island and I looked how many images there are in his journal. Anyway, I saw two images that caught my eye (304_bislandcrater.2010 and 304_bislandcraterprsdn.2010):

I also checked out the card (using my engine's code) 304 on that island. The machine is functional! Unfortunately, since the videos aren't functional in the engine yet, it doesn't look as cool as it would if they worked. Once they are working, I'll post a video of how it works (or you could just use Riveal and extract the movies as well).

For those interested in seeing this in the original game, you could always try out the debug console and switch to bspit card 304.

(Images Copyright © Cyan)

Good Bye, 2008!

2008-12-31T17:27:00.004-05:00

Well, here we are. December 31, 2008. Well, some of those who will read this are already in the new year. Yes, I haven't updated in over two months. No, I haven't done much in those two months. :P

Mohawk Stuff:
- More in-depth QuickTime support
- Raw Sound is supported
- Cinepak almost works :P
- Some fixes to screen updating in Riven

Yup, that's it! :P

Other Stuff:
- Got The Manhole 5.25"
- I programmed the reader for its resources, but I can't get scripts to work

Yeah, that's it there too. I've not had time for much lately. :\

Now, for the future!

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)!

That last one is quite lofty. I'm not sure how close to that goal we'll come, but it's worth a shot!

Eleven Years Strong

2008-10-29T18:08:00.000-04:00

Happy Birthday Riven! Eleven years ago to-date you were released! It's a good thing LordHoto volunteered to bring the cake and DrMcCoy sent out all the invitations to the party! Only kidding... :P

OK, now for what I've been (or not been) working on:

Riven:
Fixes:
- Fix a long standing bug in the ADPCM decoder
- Fix a bug with images that could crash the game

New Features:
- Support for ambient sounds in the background
- Missing Features: Fading and Track Volume
- Set variables so more of jungle island is explorable
- Improvements to the script dumper

Myst:
New Features:
- Added some more opcode shells
- Still not much going on here... Riven's still the main focus. I'm going to look into some of the opcodes soon, though.

Let's hope I can get finished by Riven's 25th anniversary :P

Wii May Have Been Saved!

2008-10-09T21:28:00.003-04:00

After years of neglecting their old games, we have a chance to replay some. No, sadly not the SCUMM games, but some of their better Star Wars games. The current rumor (here and here) is that LucasArts is putting Rogue Squadron (N64), Rogue Squadron II: Rogue Leader (GCN) and Rogue Squadron III: Rebel Strike (GCN) on a compilation disc for the Wii. This may be the greatest thing since... I don't know. There hasn't been many good LucasArts things in a while. I don't remember their last good thing. :P

That second site had some other nice things, including one article on ScummVM for the Wii and with an awesome link to Goldeneye 007 on the Wii. Yays! :P

This is a good follow-up to my article exactly three months ago. What a coincidence. :P

September Update

2008-09-19T15:13:00.005-04:00

Hello everyone! Still here (mostly)!

First, here's some screenshots:

(That would be our friend Cho, the lever to open the temple door, and the RAWA easter egg in order.)

So, here's what's been happening:

Riven:
New Features:
- Saving games! Yay! (Note: Not yet tested with the original game, but it should work)
- Basic work towards zip mode, still not working 100%.

Fixes Made:
- Fixed some nasty script bugs. We forgot to reset the script to the beginning after using. Whoops! ;)
- Improved cursor handling. We mixed up some script types.
- Improved support for loading games, specifically between versions.
- Fixed most cards, they now all show!
- Fixed some other minor bugs.
- A whole lot more that I'm forgetting. :P

What's Not Working:
- Palette issues. Most of these are worked around, but it is very evident in some cases.
- Some bug in the image decoder doesn't handle some image correctly causing them to appear messed up or crash the game.

Missing Features:
- Video (still working on it!)
- Water Effects
- Transitions
- Most Puzzles; they're hardcoded
- Most ambient sounds do not work yet. This should be a relatively easy fix, I'm just too lazy to fix it. :P
- Inventory

Myst:
Updates Made:
- Correct loading in of hotspots
- Script parser
- Uhhhh.... that's really about it. Most of the work has been concentrated on Riven.

Mohawk Galore!

2008-08-25T13:30:00.005-04:00

Yesterday, I discovered some interesting things. Games besides Myst and Riven use the Mohawk engine! Amazing (as LordHoto would say)!

Some of the games include:
- Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego?
- Logical Journey of the Zoombinis
- Where in America is Carmen Sandiego? (The Great Amtrak Train Adventure)
- The Treehouse
- Maggie's Barnyard Adventure
- James Discovers Math
- James Explores Math

However, there are differences. First off, they use a different graphics format. While they have the same resource tag as Riven's images, it's clearly different. I've been mapping out some resources, but there are still some I don't understand.

Also, the QuickTime movies have a weird codec. Its FourCC is 'Brod' and described as "CDToons". Anyone know anything about this codec?

On a brighter note, they all use the same sound format! :D

Well, after I have Riven completed, I might look a bit more into these. :)

Speaking of Riven, I've fixed some more bugs! There are still some major showstopper bugs (which I think are script related), however. I'll be focusing all my attention to stomping out those bugs now.

August Update

2008-08-20T20:33:00.004-04:00

Hello everyone!

Despite the lack of blog posts, I'm still here! (Maybe :P)

I've mostly been concentrating on Myst and Riven. Small fixes here and there, support for Myst ME sound, better support of Riven CD's sound, some work on Riven's transitions, and some hotspot work for Myst.

However, I really cannot figure out anything else out about Myst hotspot's without RE. I've only been making guesses at how it works (which conforms to most of the cases I've looked at) but I have been able to identify where the rects are (and they match where they should be on screen). So, I'm probably going to begin RE. But, as usual, I have a problem. I have not been able to open the Win3.1 version of Myst (the one I have) in IDA Freeware. However, Myst ME's executable is for Win95, so I could start with that. I don't have the original Win95 version (published by Red Orb, identical to Win3.1 version) so I cannot test that out.

I also looked a tiny bit at Myst/Riven PSX. The Myst videos end in .str, which should mean PlayStation Streams, but they don't match the format. Instead they begin with 0x60 0x01 0x01 0x80. So do the Riven videos with the .pac extension. Riven PSX seems to be almost entirely hardcoded, likely because of the slowness of Myst PSX.

And, on a sadder note, my laptop has some major errors in it and crashes randomly with random color/stripes all over the screen. I'm pretty sure it's a logic board problem.

Also, the HE SCUMM Wii games come out in 6 days! :)

Hiding in the Myst

2008-07-18T18:06:00.010-04:00

Sorry for the lack of posts, I've been busier than earlier in the summer. But, on the bright side, I still post more often than LordHoto. :P

So, my first Myst/Riven post. A while ago (on the forums) it sneaked out that an engine called "Mohawk" was in the works. Well, here it is.

One day, you'll see it in all it's glory, but it's still unstable. Riven is playable right now, though many puzzles aren't completable (due to their hardcoded nature), sound doesn't work right in the CD version (though I worked out something tonight that makes it sound better), and there isn't any video support yet. Here's a screenshot in the meantime:

Well, here's the staircase leading up from the magcar on Jungle Island (and, I mislabeled the image tspit instead of jspit), but no matter. (Note the lack of any inventory too). I'll try to upload more screenshots in the upcoming week.

The good news is, is that we can load games from the original version of Riven. Saving games isn't working yet.

OK, that's it. Just wanted to give you guys a look at what md5, sev, and myself have cooked up so far. Just enough to wet your tongues.

Oh, and here's a screenshot from Myst too (progress only began on Myst a few weeks ago, so it's far behind Riven):

There is really minimal support for Myst. Sound/graphics work, but its scripting (if you would call it scripting) is only capable of showing a few screens currently.

Wii(k) Virtual Console

2008-07-09T18:46:00.003-04:00

So, I've been playing on the Wii. A lot. Mostly Brawl, but Wii Sports as well. So, I took a look at the Wii Store. I bought two things (mostly because they made me buy a minimum of 1000 points). The first: The Internet Channel! Which is awesome (no, I'm not posting from it)! It's great for just checking e-mail and such, but using YouTube on it is even better. The other 500 points went towards a Virtual Console game -- The Legend of Zelda. Sure, it's a good game, but it's not exactly what I was looking for. "These are not the games you're looking for." I expected to get a great selection, especially for the N64, but mostly it was older Nintendo developed products. Where are all the LucasArts games for the Nintendo console: Maniac Mansion NES, Loom TurboGrafx16 (which is emulated on the Wii), the Star Wars NES/SNES games, Shadows of the Empire N64, Indiana Jones and the Infernal Machine N64? Come on, LucasArts! Even if you don't market your games you can put them there!

Not to mention one other game that should most definitely be on the list: GOLDENEYE 007!!! There are talks about it, but I doubt it's going to happen. The whole Rare/Microsoft situation and that only Activision has the current Bond license... But, hey, it could happen.

On the bright side, I'll be able to finally get Rogue Squadron 2 (not 3).

In other news, I have programmed again. My life has not been completely absorbed by the Wii. Yet.

Summer In Full Force

2008-07-02T21:02:00.003-04:00

Well, here we are. July 2 (for those under UTC-2). Summer (for those in the northern hemisphere). The second half of the year. Man, where did that first half go? Well, I've returned from Atlanta (actually, I came back ~1:30 AM on Sunday).

So, what have I been up to? Well, sadly, not much. It took two days for me to unwind and then I did nothing. Except get a Wii. Well, it's in transit, anyway. Supposedly, it's supposed to be delivered tomorrow (along with Brawl). And, then I can get Sam and Max on the Wii! And in August (specifically, August 19), I can get Pajama Sam, Freddi Fish, and Spy Fox on the Wii (and they look very SCUMM-y from the screenshots)! Not to mention putting ScummVM on the Wii! Why am I using all these exclamation points!?!

~~But, on a more serious note, I shall be returning to getting back to programming this week. No, really. I'm not kidding...~~

EDIT (7/3/08): The Wii is here!!!!!!!!!!111one

The Eye of the Tiger

2008-06-19T19:48:00.004-04:00

So, today, I chose to continue upgrading my laptop all the way to 10.4.11 (as a birthday gift to myself). Mostly for Firefox 3. Only kidding. And, surprisingly, it still runs just as fast (perhaps even faster) than it did with 10.2.8. Now time to download and compile all the stuff again.... 900+ MB for XCode 2.5.... Maybe now I can play Psychonauts or finish off S&M Season 2....

EDIT (6/23/08): Instead of just starting a new post, I'll just continue adding to this shorter one. Hey, it makes more sense to have one longer post than two short ones! :P I finished S&M Season 2. But, I'll be leaving home, heading out on the road for Atlanta later today. I'll see you all in a week. And, when I get back, I might even have a Wii! (Obviously for the new HE games to be released on the Wii, S&M, and ScummVM on the Wii!)

Resurrection

2008-06-14T09:47:00.003-04:00

Last night, my friends, a journey that began almost two years ago came to an end. My laptop is running 10.3.9. On October 31, 2006, my laptop crashed while updating from 10.3.2 to 10.3.9 and I was never able to get it to run 10.3 again. So, I was stuck with 10.2.8 for a long time. My HD broke last month and that ended the reign of 10.2.8 and I was forced to buy a new HD (120GB -- a big upgrade over 15GB). Last night, the new HD came, I installed it, and installed 10.3.2 (along with 9.2.1 for classic) and then finally upgraded to 10.3.9. So, my laptop was unofficially dead from October 31, 2006 to June 13, 2008 (Friday the 13th even, which is quite ironic if you think about it).

So, what this means is I'll be able to run a lot more than I could and now I can stop pestering people when ScummVM no longer works on 10.2.8. ;) And, I'm downloading XCode 1.5 which contains gcc3.3, so I'll be able to compile better than I was with gcc3.1.

Update on All Things

2008-06-10T16:56:00.002-04:00

The past few days I turned to something I hadn't touched in a while. About 7 months, if memory serves correctly. PreAGI. Specifically, The Gelfling Adventure. TrollVM originally had some basic code for Gelfling. It could really only load the texts and show the intro. Since then, I've made it compile under ScummVM and I've begun to add the game logic coding. Unfortunately, it's just as hardcoded as Mickey's Space Adventure. And that means it's going to be a while before anything's really playable. But at least you can navigate the first few scenes now.

I've also bought a new 120GB HD for my laptop, so maybe I'll be able to get that to work again. :)

OK, so not so much of a big update, but it's something!

Back on the Shelves

2008-06-03T16:12:00.003-04:00

No, sorry, it's not LucasArts adventure games. Nor does the recent interview really help in that direction.

Three Humongous Entertainment games are currently being sold in Target (at least in the United States): Putt-Putt Saves the Zoo, Freddi Fish 1, and SPY Fox 1. On a recent forum post, it appears that they might have some differences. Hopefully, it's not that encryption used by the downloadables (that you still have to pay for) off of Atari's website (ActiveMark's TryMedia, I believe).

On a sadder note, my laptop has officially died. It crashed (for the third day in a row), and on reboot, nothing works. It didn't actually finish starting 10.2.8, and all the graphics were messed up. I have a feeling the hard drive has conked out. Ironically, I was talking to Kostas on Sunday (before the first crash) about broken hard drives....

Go watch this in the meantime... (Yes, it's ScummVM related)

I'm Selling These Fine Leather Jackets

2008-05-24T22:10:00.002-04:00

Indy4! No, not Fate of Atlantis, but the new one! It was very good. If you're reading this and haven't seen the movie for some childish reasons or something (coughDrMcCoycough), you don't have to worry as there won't be any spoilers. I'll say two things: The movie was great, but the ending was a bit too sci-fi. And, it was better than Temple of Doom.

In other news, I fixed some RTZ Sega Saturn things and I got it to start loading the script, but before crashing due to an array out of bounds assertion. I'll look into it in the upcoming days.

I also played the "real" Indy4 and Indy5 getting ready for the movie. Too bad Indy5 barely works in WinXP, but it's always nice seeing Guybrush using a machine gun to massacre some commies.

The Best Video Games

2008-05-21T15:17:00.004-04:00

I've been playing video games for years, starting with the earliest (Concentration, Family Feud, Jeopardy!) and working my way to today. My opinion on games hasn't changed much. If I have fun playing it, it's a good game. It seems like a simple formula, but it has always worked for me. For instance, I could not get myself to play most Game Boy games (except PokeMon, which was quite addictive). Well, here are my favorite games, in category order.

Racing:

Gran Turismo

I really don't play racing games.This is one of the only exceptions. Episode I Racer, maybe too. But, it was really good. I remember playing with my Uncle for hours at a time.

FPS's:
This is tough. I was never really an FPS player. But, I have two favorites:

Dark Forces

Star Wars + FPS = Nice. Sure, I enjoyed the others, but I had the most fun in this game.

Goldeneye 007

That's right! The best multiplayer FPS I've ever played. Better than that Halo thing so many talk about. I still play with my friends who have an N64.

Strategy:

Theme Park

Besides "The Sims", it's the only strategy game I have. (The Star Wars ones will not be mentioned). I could play for hours, just building and managing.

RPG:
Blegh. RPG. I have no favorite. PokeMon would probably be the closest, but KoToR and KH also are up there.

Action/Adventure:
Ah, platforming. That's better. This is probably more of my adventure game heritage showing, though.

Crash Bandicoot 3:

Warped Yeah, that's right. Make fun all you want, but this game was really fun.

Jak and Daxter/Ratchet and Clank

Runners up. Both in their own way.

Flight Simulation:

TIE-Fighter

Star Wars bottled up into awesomeness. I haven't found a better flight sim game out there. Though, Rogue Squadron II was pretty good too. Rebel Assault also has a soft spot on me.

Adventure:
Ah, the pinnacle of gaming. The creme de la creme. Adventure games. I have no favorite. I know, that's horrible. But, I've played so many good ones! So, I'll list them here:

Monkey Island 2: LeChuck's Revenge

Riven: The Sequel to Myst

The Journeyman Project 2: Buried in Time

Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade

Disagree? Post comments!

Disclaimer: This is only the opinion of the author, clone2727.

ONE DAY LEFT!

More RTZ Sega Saturn Work

2008-05-20T17:01:00.003-04:00

Benjamin and I looked into the files a bit more. There are some different files, and some that are similar. The files are basically mapped out now.

rtz.dat: The same format as the PC version, but in BE order.

rtz.prj: Similar to the PC version, in BE order, but smaller. Many images are separate or in videos.

*.16b: Raw 16bit images in BE order.

*.ton: Raw, uncompressed 16bit audio data in BE order.

*.cpk: Sega FILM videos with the Cinepak for Sega codec.

A few others (bootsnd.mp, bootsnd.map, sddrvs.tsk) still aren't known. My guess is that they are just drivers to play the audio. Just a hunch.

Another, rtz.ref, is the game state, but it is unknown how it is used...

While we have not disassembled the binary yet (a.bin), we have noticed large tables of filenames for the videos and images. The script functions are also listed in the executable. Hopefully in their correct order :P.

TWO DAYS LEFT!

Yabause!

2008-05-19T17:11:00.002-04:00

Two days ago I guess, I ran RTZ Sega Saturn through Yabause. It worked surprisingly well! It showed the videos pretty well (only some minor stuttering, probably from running off the CD -- a Windows problem...) and was playable from what I could tell. Due to my lack of Japanese language knowledge, I had to rely on my limited knowledge of the DOS version. In that case, it's very limited. I, truthfully, never played the game until it was added to ScummVM. It had been down in my basement for years collecting dust with other non-played games.

I also ran The Manhole PCE through Hu-Go! It showed the intro, but I couldn't get far. I couldn't control the game after the beanstalk rose from the manhole. Oh well.

In other news, I've been working on an engine for a game I had to design (for something). Not for ScummVM, and not really for adventure games either. Just something that I threw together for a simple first person maze game. Perhaps I should extend it to allow for more functionality...

Semi-Progress

2008-05-16T20:32:00.002-04:00

It's been eleven days since the last post. Perhaps it's time to update. For that one person out there reading this, this is for you.

I got the Manhole PCE extracted using TurboRip. That's all so far. It appears very different from RTZ/Manhole New & Enhanced after a brief glance. I'll probably have to compare it to an original Manhole PC version. When I get it....

Return to Zork Sega Saturn came the other day. To my surprise, it actually had rtz.dat/prj. Amazing! Most console ports (that at least I have dealt with, especially from a certain company that shall remain nameless) have used a custom form of the engine. There are still many differences. The rtz.dat/prj seem to be similar to the PC versions, except in BE order. The videos are Sega FILM (with Cinepak for Sega codec), and the graphics are 16bpp. Sound/sprite formats seem to be different, and possibly external functions as well. I uploaded a patch for detection and endianness correction, as well as a rough video parser. Well, Benjamin and I'll be working on it... and knowing myself, I'll slow the process down.

On a lighter note, Putt-Putt Joins the Parade 3DO Japanese came as well. After quickly extracting the data and adding detection, it worked fine. That was simple enough!

Tune in next time. Same clone channel. Same clone time. Well, maybe a slightly different time.

The Past Few Days....

2008-05-05T19:48:00.002-04:00

Well, this weekend a few things happened. The Manhole PCE came. But, no luck extracting it (That's a long/ongoing story, that makes it seem like I have no luck whatsoever, but anywho...). I also bought Return to Zork Sega Saturn (Japanese). Still en route.

Coding wise, just a simple patch. It corrects the saved game names for save files from the MADE engine. But, I did do other coding. What it is, you may ask? Well, you may ask. It's that something else from my wiki page. Yup, I'm still working on it. Well, one of two somethin' elses.

Well, enough of this stupid enigmatic-code-talk. I'm working on

More Manhole Mayhem

2008-05-02T16:20:00.002-04:00

The Manhole PC-Engine came today. Funny how it takes only a day longer to come from Japan than Utah.... Anyway, no luck trying to extract the files yet. "dumpcd" isn't able to dump the pseudo-audio track to an iso. Perhaps another program will help.... In the end, I'll have to write an extraction program for the data like with extract_tg16_loom.

Better news is that The Manhole New and Enhanced is now working in ScummVM! Yays! (Though, my only contribution was the minor detection changes, and had almost nothing to do with it actually working... :P). Well, it works as far as I can tell anyway (it starts and shows the first few screens :P).

A Day MADE Great...

2008-05-01T17:28:00.001-04:00

Well, today "The Manhole: New and Enhanced" came. So, I wrote a patch that adds detection. Sure, it detects, but then crashes immediately. :P Oh well.....

In other news, I did get "Return to Zork" up and running..... :)

Welcome!

2008-04-30T20:30:00.000-04:00

Welcome to my new blog. Well, not really new at all. It's been here for years, but under some archaic account name. So, I reclaimed it today in hopes of rebuilding it. The few posts I made some 4 years ago are gone. I'll be posting new stuff as it comes to me. Mostly ScummVM-related posts, but some others tossed in.