Topics

1

SCI Syntax Help / Script disposal question

« on: July 30, 2026, 12:54:02 PM »

It seems that if you dispose a script in SCI, you can still check its properties afterward and get the expected values from before disposal. It's not until room change that it appears to really flush the script entirely. This feels a bit confusing because if it's not freeing up the heap before room change, what's the point?

Is it just marked disposed and still accessible until overwritten by new objects? It would be helpful to understand how that's working under the hood. TY

2

SCI Syntax Help / QfGIVCD view corruption when editing 936.v56

« on: April 04, 2026, 12:35:50 AM »

Here's a weird one.

If you make any changes to QfG4CD view 936, some of the cels get corrupted (see top three buttons in attached image). Doesn't matter if you change a pixel, alter the palette, export every cel to bmp and reimport them, move an origin point, etc.. Saving any change breaks the view in game. Adding new loops and moving cels around makes the corruption manifest differently, but in erratic ways based on my testing so far.

If you're wondering who cares about modifying some dumb shop buttons, the answer is, of course, translators.

I'm hesitant to blame this on a SCICompanion bug, because I'm told PhotoSCIhop complains about the view palette, though I haven't tested that myself.

3

SCI Syntax Help / solitary vaules in QfGIV changeStage switch statement

« on: January 07, 2026, 06:27:37 PM »

What's the purpose of the solitary vaules such as this from QfGIV rm340:

Code: [Select]

(method (changeState newState)
(switch (= state newState)
(0
0 ; THE VALUE IN QUESTION
(theGame handsOff:)
(if (and (== (barrel x?) 116) (not (Btst 254)))
(self changeState: 6)
else
(= cycles 1)
)
)
...

I've looked at 'setScript' and some other possibilities and maybe it's setting the register value or something, but found nothing conclusive. Honestly, it just doesn't make sense to me.

They appear in both EO's and Sluice's decompile repos, so I don't think it's a mistake. Anyone know?

4

SCI Syntax Help / SCI1.1 File::readString first byte

« on: October 24, 2025, 10:43:07 PM »

Consider a text file containing the alphabet. If we use the File class's readString with a max size property of 5 and then print the string, the output is 'abcd', if the max size is 1, then we get a blank text box; max size of 2 results in 'a'.

A hex editor confirms that the first byte of the text file is 0x61 (a), so what's up with that 'empty' first byte in the max size property?

5

SCI Syntax Help / SCICompanion compile issues with LB2CD

« on: October 08, 2025, 09:14:16 PM »

SCICompanion seems to have issues with LB2CD where scripts expect WrapMusic to have the class value of 0x86 and Actions to be 0x2E, but decompiling results in a .sco file where WrapMusic is 0x2E and Actions are 0x86.

Spanish translator Avo323 discovered if you swap the WrapMusic and Actions class definitions in main, it compiles other scripts with the correct class values that they expect and you can generate working patches that don't break WrapMusic; though if main (and .hep) is exported as a patch with this method it crashes the game. Actions is defined in both main and objCue and doesn't seem to care what the class value is (or is only using objCue version), where as a broken WrapMusic breaks audio in game; sometime resulting in later crashes because of undisposed audio.

So we have a solution to create working patches (barring changes to main, which can be hex edited), but it's still frustrating that it's unknown where the fundamental issue lies. LB2 floppy was missing a vocab file, but this seems specific to a 0.sco problem. It would be better to understand the cause, but I guess I can live without knowing if need be.

Is it a case of some Sierra dev making changes to main before release and not recompiling the other scripts? Curious if anyone has insight to this, before moving on.

6

SCI Syntax Help / LSL6 Gravis Ultrasound Audio

« on: February 06, 2025, 11:56:20 PM »

After getting Gravis Ultrasound emulation working in DOSBox for a non-sierra project, I read LSL6 was one of the few games compatible with the card.

I downloaded the sierra GUS drivers from Sierrahelp, but couldn't seem to get it working.

Searching this site didn't turn up much and I couldn't find any youtube videos showing off lsl6 GUS audio. Anyone already do the leg work on this?

I'm curious if it sounds better or worse than the SB audio. GUS seems to be a crapshoot.

7

SCI Development Tools / KQ6 original 911 patch files

« on: January 05, 2025, 06:47:04 PM »

If you remember this thread you know that a corrupt debug script was found in the Italian version of KQ6 by Omer. It was eventually restored to work with the english version of KQ6CD.

On Dec 17th some floppy disks were uploaded to archive.org recovered from Dave Lowe's studio. One of the disks labeled "Sierra Cheat Code SCIV" contains 911.SCR, 911.HEP & 911.TXT. These are for the floppy version of KQ6. They crash with KQ6CD. It also contains ROOMS.TXT. A nicely formatted list of room names and numbers for teleporting to.

Code: [Select]

screen sierra description
no

isle of crowns

2 200 beach
3 210 tree
4 220 castle gate
5 230 castle wall
6 240 village 1
7 250 village 2
8 260 ferry docks
9 270 book shop
10 280 pawn brokers
11 290 ferry boat

cartoons

12 130 magicmap
13 135     ocean
14 140 cassima
15 145 vizier/genie
16 150 alex/vizier
17 155 nightmare
18 160 v & c wed
19 165 a & c wed
20 180 alex prop

isle of wonder

23 450 beach
24 460 !
25 470 swamp
26 480 gardens
27 490 chessboard

isle of beast

28 500 beach
29 510 stone archer
30 520 boiling pond
31 540 beasts garden

isle of mists

32 550 beach
33 560 druids woods
34 580 stone circle

realm of dead

35 600 surface 1
36 630 surface 2
37 640 entrance
38 650 passage
39 660 river styx
40 670 gates
41 680 hall
42 690 lord of dead

castle

43 700 stairs
44 710 west basement
45 720 north basement
46 730 grand hall
47 740 throne room
48 750 tower room
49 770 treasure room
50 780 bedrooms
51 790 tower landing
52 800 passage landing
53 810 passage hallway
54 820 dungeon
55 840 east basement
56 850 west upstairs
57 860 east upstairs
58 870 north upstairs
59 880 behind pillar

isle of sacred mountain

12 300 beach
13 320 logic cliff
14 330 top of cliffs
15 350 winged gates
16 370 palace nest
17 380 oracle
18 390 caves

labyrinth

19 400 generic rooms
20 410 spike maze
21 420 crushing room
22 440 minotaurs lair

As you can see from the pictures, both the floppy and CD script debuggers are functionally identical; though I'm not sure if the cursor artifacts in 2.png are cause by the patch, or the floppy version is just glitchy in general. I tested it with DOS, perhaps it's meant for the Amiga version?

Just like the CD version, additional debugging effects are enabled if an empty file named g is present in the game folder.

The other disks contain the "german" version of the KQ6 intro playable in an amiga emulator. The text in the intro is all english though.

There are a lot of music source files with some interesting comments by Dave to dig through as well.

8

SCI Syntax Help / Is this an official Sierra release?

« on: May 18, 2024, 03:52:24 AM »

Anyone know if this is an official release?

https://www.ebay.fr/itm/203625136856?

9

SCI Syntax Help / QfGIV text wrap

« on: April 20, 2024, 12:46:23 PM »

Anyone know where the character limit for wrapping strings to a newline in QfG4 lives? For Print statements you can set a custom "width:", but that doesn't work with messenger lines so a translator was asking how to change the default text width.

10

SCI Syntax Help / LB2 Floppy questions are a burden to others

« on: February 05, 2024, 09:55:02 PM »

I'm having trouble with the floppy version of Laura Bow 2. If I try to decompile v1.000 all the properties are replaced with "sel_". If I recompile, it produces thousands of errors.

Alternately, if I try compiling using sluciebox's sci-scripts the property names are correct, but SCICompanion doesn't recognize any of them.

In the attached pic you can see SCICompanion's decompile issue on the right, and the sci-scripts compile attempt on the left.

I've never seen a problem like this with any other game, so if anyone knows what's up or can point me in a direction to investigate further, please let me know.

Tangentially, I was pleasantly surprised to see a Patrick McGoohan quote used as a pat response for the Question Icon in LB2. Pretty funny.

11

SCI Community How To's & Tutorials / SQ3 uncensored death [NSFW]

« on: January 19, 2024, 02:34:06 AM »

Everyone likely remembers the conveyor belt death in SQ3:


But few have seen the uncensored version because it only partially exists.

It's well known that there is an unused resource, view.35, that has Roger getting mulched. The blood is cyan; perhaps an intermediate step before the final censor text. IMO, the change to a text box was probably made because it's funnier, not because there was pressure for censorship, but who knows.


It's easy to recolor the gore red and add a blank cel to the end of loop 1, but there are other issues.

Roger's priority is incorrect for a few frames when he appears in front, not behind the railing; an often unnoticed bug in the retail version of the game.


In addition to changing the censored view from 20 to 35 it also needs to be repositioned.  The original values are commented out and replaced.


edit: Editing priorities in pic.010 isn't needed once the view is correctly repositioned.

The final result might represent what Scott & Mark first considered putting in the game.


If you're sick enough to want to see this in-game the patch files are attached below.

12

SCI Syntax Help / ((or temp1025 temp1024) nsLeft:)?

« on: January 03, 2024, 09:44:25 PM »

In the LSL5 SCI-Scripts decompile Interface.sc line 250 is:

Code: [Select]

((or temp1025 temp1024) nsLeft:)

SCiCompanion will not compile the code, but:

Code: [Select]

(= temp0 0)
(= temp1 5)
(Printf {%d} (or temp0 temp1))

Results in 1, not 5. The following would work:

Code: [Select]

((if temp1025 else temp1024) nsLeft:)
But does 'or' ever?

13

SCI Syntax Help / SCI1 View Format

« on: October 07, 2023, 06:52:15 PM »

I'm trying to convert SCI0 Views to SCI1. If there is an existing tool, please let me know. It can be done by exporting each cell in SC then importing as an image sequence, but it's tedious to do.

The SCI0 view format is straightforward enough. I can parse the file and export all loops and cels which gets me most of the way there, but it would be nice to convert to .v56 instead of having to rebuild the view by hand in SC.

Here's the problem. A comment in Scummvm's repo says the SCI1 view should be:

// LoopCount:WORD MirrorMask:WORD Version:WORD PaletteOffset:WORD LoopOffset0:WORD LoopOffset1:WORD...

but when looking at 0.v56 from KQ5, I can find the loop count [8] at 0x26, but nothing else seems correct. Loop 1 should mirror loop 0, and since that's the only mirrored loop, the mirror mask should be 0x0200. The Palette seems to be tacked on to the end of the file and is nowhere near the supposed palette offset. Loop offsets also appear incorrect.

For VGA11 is formatted a bit different, but I'm still having the same problem - I can find the loop count, but nothing else seems to match up.

Any thoughts as to where I'm going wrong here?

14

The Games and other Sierra Adventure stuff / EQ1-CDR and PQ2PnC

« on: July 16, 2023, 03:29:35 PM »

I'd like to announce that my friend Threepwang has just completed his restoration and French translation of Eco Quest 1 CD!

The CD release of EQ1 added some amazing voice acting to a beautiful undersea adventure, but it's riddled with bugs, palette issues, and scaled down graphics. We worked closely together for over nine months to fix every bug, transition, missing/broken message, and restore the original floppy pics & views. It's been throughly tested in both DOSBox and ScummVM and should objectively be the best possible way to experience the game. An English version of the restoration can be downloaded here.

Also nearing completion is my friend Pakolmo's Point n Click conversion and Spanish translation of Police Quest 2.

This is a complete conversion of PQ2 allowing it to be played entirely with a mouse! Several game mechanics have been reworked to support the new control scheme such as the driving, phone and computer interfaces. The Spanish patch is complete, but the English version is wrapping up testing and may still contain Spanish text in some places.

It's been a pleasure working with both Threepwang and Pakolmo on these ambitious projects. I look forward to the next collaboration and many thanks to them both!

15

SCI Syntax Help / New SCI0 class using patch files

« on: July 14, 2023, 05:23:58 PM »

If I mod an existing SCI0 game only using patch files and need to add a new class, it doesn't seem to work. ScummVM complains about an unknow species. This happens even if the new class is defined-in and only-used by the script.xxx patch I'm exporting. Of course the class works as expected when running the rebuilt resource files.

I've tried 'compile all' in SC after adding the class and exporting scprit.000 along with the class patch hoping that might help, but it's the same issue. Anyone know how I might add a new class only using patch files?