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SCI Programming => SCI Development Tools => Topic started by: deckarep on August 23, 2024, 04:41:57 PM
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Hello,
I know this is not a traditional adventure game and it only runs on Windows but the 1998 game Larry's Casino has had much of its resource format reverse engineered and extracted in terms of sprites, UI elements and audio.
I couldn't have done this effort without the help of @doomlazer who was kind of enough to contribute time, energy and code to the effort and additionally was solely responsible for all the audio extraction effort which he previously did in his TrivialQuest project found here: https://github.com/Doomlazer/TrivialQuest
This reverse engineering effort was written in Python3 and as it stands still needs some effort to get the game backgrounds extracted to be 100% completed.
Please see the project here: https://github.com/deckarep/laffer-casino-extractor
Btw, although Larry's Casino is not an adventure game, buried within the binary are many references to SCI components and namespaces. It has many concepts related to SCI and seems to have some degree of the engine baked within it which is why I've added it under this forum category.
If anyone wants to take a crack at extracting the backgrounds, please submit a pull-request to the project. To get started all you need is the original game's RESOURCE.VOL and RESOURCE.AUD files.
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Hey, it's the last two projects I worked on before work sucked all the life out of me.
Seriously, Larry's Casino is awesome and I wish 80% of it wasn't completely inaccessible since WON network went offline.
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Thanks Doomlazer!
I would say the saving grace about LC is at least most games are playable offline and you can still get some of the experience with the talking characters. But it?s a shame a lot of it is no longer working due to WON being down.
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The offline games work, but I think the hotel lobby, shop, etc. are lost to time unless the scripts can be reverse engineered. Seems unlikely anyone captured any gameplay footage of those.
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Seriously, Larry's Casino is awesome and I wish 80% of it wasn't completely inaccessible since WON network went offline.
If only someone reimplemented the server-side code...
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Did they?
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Not that I know of. But the INN servers have been reimplemented, so there is a precedent.
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ok, wikipedia says something was done for half-life, but I doubt that included LC stuff
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There were two projects (Faux INN and INN Revival.) before INN Barn. After INN Revival was shut down there was a project to RE its closed source code, but it never got anywhere. I think that Omer was at least tangentially involved with that one.
I do believe that the server for The Realm was recreated as well, but that would have been more LSCI based than WON was.
James Leiterman use to work as a developer in Sierra's Barn before it was shut down and he had the advantage that we had Sierra's source for the client. Not sure that the WON was ever leaked, so anyone that wanted to do so would probably have to RE it from scratch.
You could try contacting James on Facebook to see if he has any information on WON, but I don't think he was involved with it. He might know someone to ask.
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I read somewhere Larry's Casino is a fork of Hoyle's Casino, but HC98 (earliest version I could find) didn't seem to use the same "TEX 0001" image format as LC.
Even if somebody had a working HC WON private server, I'd bet LC would need to be intentionally supported. There were several tiers of hotel rooms you could purchase, so maybe that was stored sever side and the reason why it doesn't load the Lobby without a WON connection.
LC seems to have a custom image RLE. Backgrounds use a different algorithm from the sprites for some reason. The audio was easy to extract. It's just RIFF wav. #CyberLarry2000
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James Leiterman use to work as a developer in Sierra's Barn before it was shut down and he had the advantage that we had Sierra's source for the client. Not sure that the WON was ever leaked, so anyone that wanted to do so would probably have to RE it from scratch.
Hmm, was he the guy that I helped with a bug? He was writing (or exchanging maybe) bogus configuration data which caused a delayed crash - only he didn't realize it was delayed, so he kept looking at the wrong section of code.
Oh, and shut down? As in cease & desist?
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After INN Revival was shut down there was a project to RE its closed source code, but it never got anywhere. I think that Omer was at least tangentially involved with that one.
I was. I got access to INN's client source code and collaborated with a couple of guys trying to RE the server. It died out before we got anywhere.
Oh, and shut down? As in cease & desist?
I think Andrew meant that the original INN was shut down (by Sierra), not James' server.
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Yes. INN was run in an old converted barn. That building was referred to by Sierra as "the barn., which is where the name came from for the recreated server. Inn Barn is still very much alive. http://sierrahelp.com/Misc/INNBarn.html
Omer, the client source you had, was that 2.4? We had the 2.4 source. It came from one of the original developers.
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Omer, the client source you had, was that 2.4? We had the 2.4 source. It came from one of the original developers.
Yes, that's what we had.