Mohawk in 16bpp

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!

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

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

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

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!

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

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

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

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

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

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!

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!

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

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!

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

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!

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

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

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

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.