Community

SCI Programming => SCI Syntax Help => Topic started by: Pakolmo on February 17, 2016, 10:28:13 AM

Title: Change interpreter SCI
Post by: Pakolmo on February 17, 2016, 10:28:13 AM
Hello!

I want to change the Phantasmagoria 1 interpreter with the Phantasmagoria 2 interpreter.

The interpreter of Phantasmagoria 2 have 2 dll, activex.dll and duck95dll.dll. I need duck95dll for plays duck videos in Phantasmagoria 1.

Can you help me?
Title: Re: Change interpreter SCI
Post by: Kawa on February 17, 2016, 11:27:29 AM
Like I said in the other thread, you can't just replace the terp. Phanta2 requires things Phanta1 doesn't and vice versa, such as the video stuff.
Title: Re: Change interpreter SCI
Post by: MusicallyInspired on February 17, 2016, 11:49:29 AM
The interpreters aren't drag-and-drop cross-compatible. If they were there wouldn't be multiple interpreters.
Title: Re: Change interpreter SCI
Post by: Kawa on February 17, 2016, 11:57:55 AM
Well, backwards compatible, more like? You can't run an SCI0 game on SCI11, or either of these on SCI2 or 3, even though there's no real technical reason why an SCI3 terp couldn't be made to support SCI0, beyond the historical.
Title: Re: Change interpreter SCI
Post by: lskovlun on February 17, 2016, 12:22:00 PM
The memory model comes to mind. You can't take pointers to stuff, which SCI16 games relied on heavily.
Apart from that, I suppose you could write a script loader and other necessary pieces for SCI0... (that's sort of what ScummVM is, and we do have script loaders for all the generations of SCI now).

A greater difficulty is that we don't have source for these games. If we did, then this might be a few slight fixes and a recompile. Having to convert binary script files from one format to another is a lot more difficult, and the software just doesn'r exist. It would have to be written first.
Title: Re: Change interpreter SCI
Post by: Kawa on February 17, 2016, 01:33:22 PM
Teal deer: can't be done.
Title: Re: Change interpreter SCI
Post by: Collector on February 17, 2016, 09:58:44 PM
I have heard that often the interpreters were modified for some games and because they were game specific they stored the source for the interpreter with the game source.
Title: Re: Change interpreter SCI
Post by: Kawa on February 18, 2016, 07:33:34 AM
I have heard that often the interpreters were modified for some games and because they were game specific they stored the source for the interpreter with the game source.
Larry 6's menu bar comes to mind, pretty much the only 256-color SCI game in the wild to have one I believe. OmerMor's terp source used to hide that feature behind #if MENUBAR, renamed #if TESTER in this copy. And that's only the low-res SCI11 version -- the high-res one's a scripted simulation.