Community
Community Affairs => Forum Support and Suggestions => Topic started by: joek0 on March 24, 2010, 07:20:09 PM
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Hi! I'm new to the forum. I recommend adding DOSBOX to the links and tools section. It is a great DOS emulator and sierra recommends it for newer windows PC's.
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Welcome to the community joeko, and yes I agree that dosbox should be on the tools page too. I have always intended to add it. I have just recently got the actual development tools listed and haven't had the time yet to track down and add the tools for actually playing sci games. Since we primarily make games here I felt that list was more important. If you or anyone else has any other suggestions though, I am always open to them, it's your community too afterall.
If you spend any amount of time here, which I hope you will, you will see that there are a number of areas that aren't quite finished yet and bits and pieces get updated here and there.
Someday hopefully everything I want to do will actually get done unfortunately that day is not today, right now I am trying to get the point and click tutorial finished, I don't like it only being half done, after that I probably will finish blueing up the rest of the tutorials, and there's the walkthrus and point lists and ....
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When you do get around to it, add ScummVM as well. It can play AGI and SCI games now.
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I have Windows XP and some of the games don't run smootly with MSDOS. DOSBOX is the only way for me to play other peoples SCI games.
joek0
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For the love of mercy don't try to play DOS games in DOS mode in WinXP/2000/Vista/7 at all! For one thing the sound won't work. Also, you'll probably have speed issues.
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When you do get around to it, add ScummVM as well. It can play AGI and SCI games now.
I'm on the fence on this MI, they don't have any sci games listed on the compatability page, only agi ones, and those aren't at 100%
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None of the games will ever be 100% because of the fact that it's using a different interpreter. But it's more than enough to play the game. You don't even notice the differences (I think the only differences are behind the scenes and not part of the gaming experienc. Even LA adventures aren't 100%. AGI games play perfectly well as the interpreter used is Sarien.
As for SCI games, the reason they're not on the compatibility page yet is because their still working on the SCI interpreter. Sarien is finished so AGI games are on there. FreeSCI is not finished but there has been a lot of work completed on it and it's much farther along now than FreeSCI was before it merged with ScummVM. I actually think the SCI interpreter is disabled by default in the latest stable release of ScummVM, but you can download the daily builds and the engine is enabled. I was just playing Space Quest 5 yesterday with near perfect playability (just a few graphical issues that weren't ironed out yet like some scaling sprites and rotating palette images).
But anyway, your choice. It certainly plays SCI0 games without any issues that I can spot.
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DosBox fits all of my needs so I haven't actually tried scummvm, so I don't know. It's not up to me, if it needs to be on the tools page then I'll put it up there.
Just from what I saw though, it didn't look like it needed to be there yet, your call, let me know.
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Perhaps I'll do some recon and try all Sierra games out on it and play them through to the end and see how well they work then get back to you.
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lol, yeah, that is no small feat. :P
But hey, I guess you can check out some of the walkthroughs that are up under the sierra games page. Most of them were copied from other sites and I plan to convert them all over to the problem, hint format but that's just one more thing that takes time.
Anyway, they are there if you need them.
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Good idea to list ScummVM, but DOSBox is my first choice for both AGI and SCI games. As MI once noted, the sound emulation for the AGI games is bad and generally it does not offer much advantage over DOSBox. The one advantage it does have is the lower overhead that some hand held devices need. The main thing that I am looking forward to is support for the Win version of KQ6 so I can play it on my Win7-64 without having to resort to XP-Mode or installing Windows in a VM.
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Ok, done, ScummVM has now been listed on the tools page.
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Scumm VM is not running SCI games for me. Its running my AGI games fine though.
joek
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Scumm VM is not running SCI games for me. Its running my AGI games fine though.
joek
SCI support is being added. It does not officially do so, yet. To run SCI games you need to use an SVN version (http://www.scummvm.org/downloads/#SVN) or developmental version. Just don't ask for support for SCI games, as it is a WIP.
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Hmmm, I should probably update the tools page to not include a download, as I posted the win32 installer.... Something for me to do tomorow I guess, or maybe remove it until it is official from scummvm that it's good to go.
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Hmmm, I should probably update the tools page to not include a download, as I posted the win32 installer.... Something for me to do tomorow I guess, or maybe remove it until it is official from scummvm that it's good to go.
Good idea. The latest version was just released today and your download will become outdated every time a new version is released. In addition there are several downloads on the scummvm.org download page; the current build, the SVN build (which is updated daily), the ScummVM tools package, builds fro other platforms, the freeware games that they have permission to distribute, etc. Just linking to the download page lets them do all of the maintenance instead of you having to duplicate their work. It's not like scummvm.org is going to disappear the way that other sites have.
By the way, I have a number of SCI related tools that I have collected. I can mirror the tools on The Sierra Help Pages and provide you with anything that I have that you may not already have.
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What sorts of SCI tools do you have, Collector?
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Besides the ones already listed here, like Companion, Studio and the Resource Viewer, I have an SCI VGA Decoder, a Script Dumper, Enrico Rolfi's TraduSCI and UniSCI, Vag's VMD Player. I may have a couple of other things, but I would have to look.
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Ah yes. There's also the SCI EGA decoder and the SIC32 resource dumper that I have as well. I also found some Russian SCI decoding tools somewhere. Basically the same thing as the EGA and VGA decoders, though, except a little more fancy and with less understandable writing (unless you read Russian).
Or did I get that from you?
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I think that the only things that we have exchanged has been different versions of the Sierra Resource Viewer. What I would like to see is to pool all these together and get them mirrored on more than one server. Some of these are hard to find, these days.
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Indeed. And we seem to be seeing a resurgence in the Sierra community lately for whatever reason. I believe the Sierra Help Pages and the recent re-releases on GoG have contributed to it in some way. It really is prime time to start making such utilities available for the interested before the interest dies out again.
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Hey Collector, I don't have time right now, but if your tools page is up to date, I'll swing by and download the relevant sci tools and add them to the tools page here when I get a chance.
When everything is all squared away, I will probably rewrite the tools page to include a mirror link to the duplicate tools that we offer. I'm not sure when that will be, but your right, having these tools on more than one server would be beneficial.
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I don't have a page up, yet, but I am working on one, now. Once you have your page done, I can link to both the files on SHP as well as here.
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OK, I've had a chance to sort through most on my SCI tools and made a page for them.
The Sierra Help Pages SCI Tools page (http://sierrahelp.com/Utilities/AGI-SCITools/SCITools.html)
I also had the SCI utilities from Brian's old Ultimate AGI/SCI Site. Most of these are dated or have been superseded, but I uploaded them to my site, as well.
Older SCI tools (http://sierrahelp.com/Utilities/AGI-SCITools/OldSCITools.html)
And Brandon, I thought that I had downloaded the SCI Resource Viewer with the CLI version that you had linked to on the SHP forums, but I can't find it. The link is now dead. Could you post it again? You can post it directly on the forum in that thread.
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I'll get them up when I can. The GUI version that goes with them also has a few capabilities that "Version 1" doesn't have. I'll bundle that too.
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I'll leave version 1 up, but I'll also include yours.
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Indeed. I believe Version 1 can open some games that my version can't. But anyways. Sorry it took so long. Computer trouble.
http://brandonblume.com/games/sciviewer_cli_gui.zip (http://brandonblume.com/games/sciviewer_cli_gui.zip)
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It looks like the only differences in features are in the preferences, mostly in terms of export. It is too bad that the source was not released.
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It does open some games differently than others. EGA SCI1 games, or instance, open correctly whereas I believe Version 1 gets the palettes a bit wrong.