Messages

1

The Games and other Sierra Adventure stuff / Re: What are we working on?

« on: January 06, 2021, 01:36:39 PM »

I've decided to expand my game decompilation efforts to SCUMM games. I've already got some here. I was pleased to find that the SCUMM demos were stripped-down versions of the full games, just like the SCI ones!

Since there's no simple IDE for SCUMM games, I had to make do with ScummRP (to extract the data files) and descumm (from the ScummVM tools). I got the idea from this disassembly project for the C64 version of Maniac Mansion.

2

Everything-Else / Nintendo Gigaleak Reveals They Wanted To Hire a 3DS Hacker

« on: December 22, 2020, 12:26:05 PM »

It seems like Nintendo can't catch a break. A series of tweets with the highlights can be found here.

Mighty shady of them to extort a homebrew hacker in this way, and to even have a PR plan in place in case word of this got out.

Then again, it's not unusual for companies to sometimes hire members of the modding community to do official projects...

Obviously, it's not a good idea to link to any of these files here; I prefer not to know. Let's just say that they're out there, and leave it at that.

3

AGI Development Tools / Re: WinAGI Version 2.1.3 Is Available

« on: December 10, 2020, 06:33:35 PM »

And here are decompilations for two of the demo packs. Yeah, AGI is not my thing.

4

AGI Development Tools / Re: WinAGI Version 2.1.3 Is Available

« on: December 08, 2020, 06:08:25 PM »

Here's the decompilation for the Christmas Card.

5

AGI Development Tools / Re: WinAGI Version 2.1.3 Is Available

« on: December 07, 2020, 07:01:24 PM »

Thanks, it seems to work fine now! Maybe I can do a decompilation of the 1986 Christmas Card - it's the right time for that one!

6

AGI Development Tools / Re: WinAGI Version 2.1.2 Is Available

« on: December 06, 2020, 05:37:36 PM »

I probably could make a new repository for WinAGI decompilations, but AGI is a totally different beast than SCI. Besides, WinAGI refuses to work right for me, giving "Invalid procedure call" when attempting to close a game, and an error with "RichEdAGI.ocx or one of its dependencies not correctly registered: a file is missing for invalid" when attempting to open a logic.

7

SCI Development Tools / Re: Error in SCICompanion documentation - fopen

« on: October 04, 2020, 05:15:12 PM »

You can also use the File class to manage files.

Code: [Select]

(instance fooFile of File
     (properties
           name "somefile.txt"
     )

(procedure (Foo &tmp [buffer 41])
        ; Open the file and write to it
        (if (fooFile open: fTrunc)
                (fooFile write: "Hello World!")
                (fooFile close:)
        )

        ; Open the file, read it's first string, and print it to the screen
        (if (fooFile open: fRead)
                (fooFile read: @buffer 40)
                (fooFile close:)

                (Printf "%s" buffer)
        )
)
This way is much simpler than using the kernel functions directly. With SCI01 and up, read: and write: are renamed to readString: and writeString: respectively. Should test this to see how it works...

8

The Games and other Sierra Adventure stuff / Re: Rare SCI Games

« on: October 04, 2020, 05:00:56 PM »

@ Threepwang,
Police quest 4 was released in French. Quest for Glory 4 was not released in French. Only Quest for Glory 3 and the translation is bad.

QFG4's documentation was translated to French, but the game itself wasn't. This was even mentioned in the QFG Anthology's readme:

Question: There is French documentation for QG4 in the \DOCO
directory on the QG Collection CD, but there is no QG4 French game
on the CD.  Why?
Answer: The documentation was printed in French, but we never released
a French version of QG4.  We included the French documentation on the
CD in case someone wanted to take a look at it.

9

The Games and other Sierra Adventure stuff / Re: SCI Tetris

« on: September 22, 2020, 10:52:01 AM »

I've played through this a bit, and greatly optimized the code. Here are some of the changes made:

The system scripts and globals have been replaced with the original Sierra ones.

Unnecessary LSL3 remnants have been removed.

The high-score file is now managed entirely by a distinct File object and its methods. This is much simpler than using the kernel functions.

The menu bar has been greatly simplified. Save and Restore aren't needed for this kind of game.

You can now move blocks with the arrow keys as well as WASD.

10

SCI Syntax Help / Re: Sci.0 wish-list: diagonal movement, title-bar colour, and parser questions

« on: September 20, 2020, 09:30:45 PM »

2. As far as I know you can't change the title bar colour in SCI0. DrawStatus is a Kernel Function.

But the status bar is white. Title bars would be the things on top of windows, and those are gray in SCI0.

Even though DrawStatus would only take color arguments in the VGA terps, and the window drawer would switch to black (can't guarantee #8 is dark gray any more), both of these things can be custom-drawn.

Cool, I'll have a look - still not sure how to read the script files of genuine Sierra games, is there another piece of software I'm missing?

A plain text editor?

I can verify that the ability for DrawStatus to take color arguments was added in 11/30/1990, per the Run-Time System Changes document. I tested this in my SCI01 template (which uses Seasoned Professional EGA's interpreter), and it works.

Now I know why the title bar color was changed from grey to black.

11

The Games and other Sierra Adventure stuff / Re: King's Quest IV VGA-ish

« on: September 10, 2020, 11:16:50 AM »

Ironically, SQ4 might also be a good candidate.

As I understand it they wrote it for a text parser originally, then were forced to convert to point and click. I’d read somewhere that the only reason they were able to do that way because they wrote some kind of conversion function that would convert verb clicks into the text ‘said’ strings they’d originally programmed for. So the underlying code is still just parsing saids. I haven’t looked into it myself though.

Regardless, this looks like a fantastic project. I can’t wait to follow your progress.

I have looked into it, and I think it's related to the new Feature class introduced in SCI01. This class was moved out of script 998 (Actor), and into its own script, 950.
There, it was greatly expanded to include support for doVerb code. Script 996 (User) added the VerbMessager class which converted said specs into verbs. I know that KQ1SCI and QFG2 used this.
I think this was meant to help the programmers transition from the parser to an icon-based interface.

12

SCI Development Tools / Re: SCI32 Source Code

« on: August 17, 2020, 11:53:51 AM »

One thing I did notice in regards to the view editor - if you modify a view, there's a risk of it not displaying properly in the game. I discovered this when removing the embedded palette from the stock arrow cursor - the lower half of the cursor is gone in the game, but it is shown properly in the view editor.

On the plus side, SQ6 Roger looks simple enough (mostly solid colors instead of being really pixellated like GK1 Gabriel) to recolor into a generic ego. Sometimes the cartoony look pays off...

13

SCI Development Tools / Re: SCI32 Source Code

« on: August 15, 2020, 09:27:03 PM »

Yes, the interpreter still has MIDI support; I tested it myself. But since the music drivers weren't included, I grabbed the ones from the SQ6 demo.

14

SCI Development Tools / Re: SCI32 Source Code

« on: August 15, 2020, 06:44:56 PM »

I've put together a barebones template in SCI32. It was built from the Torin's Passage demo. Download it here.

All system scripts are based on the 10/12/1995 source.

I was pleased to find that the interpreter for the Torin demo appears to have no version stamp check. So that's one obstacle cleared.

There's still one other issue: if the resource file is modified, SCICompanion mistakenly auto-detects the resource.map format as SCI1.0 and no LOFSA absolute. This results in errors relating to offsets if the resource file is altered any further!

15

SCI Development Tools / Re: SCI01 Template Game

« on: August 15, 2020, 06:29:37 PM »

I'm 99.99% sure I want to migrate my current project from SCI0 to SCI01!

I only have a couple questions:
1. Is the template generally complete? I guess it hasn't been tested a whole lot, so it's hard to say, but I just wanted to make sure.

Yes, it's just about complete.

2. I have the ability to mass extract resources from my project, but is there a way to mass insert resources while keeping all the same resource numbers, etc? Or am I going to have to do that manually? I have, ahem...a lot

If you're managing resources as patch files, it's just a matter of drag-and-drop. Pics and views are fully compatible. Sounds will need to be converted to SCI1.