Topics

1

The Games and other Sierra Adventure stuff / Johnny Castaway running as a native Mac app

« on: August 15, 2025, 12:32:32 AM »

I wanted to see how far down the rabbit hole to go to get this running as a native desktop app for MacOS.
Well, it?s not too bad!

There?s been various attempts by the open source community to get it running. Without that as a starting point, this wouldn?t be possible for me. Anyhow, if you have a newer Apple Silicon M chip Mac this will work for you!

You will likely have to approve it so Gatekeeper stops complaining. There?s info on the site about it.

https://deckarep.itch.io/johnny-castaway-demo

- no emulation needed
- no bootcamp/parallels
- no Windows 3.1
- no need to compile anything
- just download and run

2

SCI Development Tools / Sluicebox Decompiler is open sourced

« on: April 07, 2025, 11:53:16 AM »

Very nice of him to finally do this: https://github.com/sluicebox/sci-tools

It`s a c#/dotnet toolset and I was able to get this running on Apple Mac Silicon on the first try!

Sluicebox if you are in this community a big thank you! And of course a big thank you to any and all SCI hackers past and present!

3

The Games and other Sierra Adventure stuff / King?s Quest 6 - Match 3 casual game - 4 character levels

« on: January 06, 2025, 01:24:32 PM »

Hi friends,

I?ve long been thinking of different ways to enjoy some of the characters from the classic Sierra games and ended up prototyping a casual Match-3 Bejeweled style game themed after KQ6.

I know it?s not an adventure game but I see it as a supplementary works to the original game with the goal of offering a new, nostalgic experience.

Curious to hear thoughts!

4

SCI Development Tools / Larry Casino Sprites and Audio extracted.

« on: August 23, 2024, 04:41:57 PM »

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.

5

SCI Development Tools / SCI Unlocked - Sierra's game engine running on Zig + Raylib + WASM/WEB

« on: February 22, 2024, 02:18:51 AM »

Hello,

Just wanted to share some progress on the viability of SCI's runtime reimplemented in Python3. The YouTube link will have much more context and details on exactly what is happening. But I now have a good portion of code running rm110 on LSL1-VGA. There's lot of things that are not yet implemented but many things do work. The game is running at ~60FPS but so far isn't doing anything too taxing except for animated like 5 cast members, playing some layered audio tracks and unlike the original engine rendering everything each frame.

It will be a lot more work to get even a single game playable, let alone completable. But this has so many possibilities.



Give a careful listen to Ken's blabbing...

6

SCI Development Tools / SCI0, SCI1 command-line tools to extract resources?

« on: January 30, 2024, 06:57:48 PM »

Hello,

I'm aware of a lot of development tools that are GUI and Windows-based. I'm on a Mac, so I'm partially screwed although I know I can spin up a Windows virtual-machine to use such tools.

My question is, do any command-line tools exists (newer ones) that can reliably extract SCI-based resources with the appropriate meta-data intact? What I'm specifically looking for as an example is a tool that can extract background PIC resources and name them appropriately. For a VIEW, it would be more involved; a tool that can extract the View into a modern image format like .png (with the correct file-name) but also extract the meta-data into some format where the meta-data describes the pattern of the view: the loop number, the cell width/size, whether it's used as a mirror or not.

I suppose I have two options on the table:
   1.) use SCICompanion and just do an extract-all but to my knowledge this won't provide the meta-data that I need, to also understand the layout of the views. Pics are easy, because they're just static backgrounds with the same dimensions (to my understanding).

   2.) My other option is to just bite the bullet and build it or hook into the appropriate code with the ScummVM project which I'm also willing to do.

So far I'm aware of: SCICompanion, SCIStudio, the original DOS executables created by Sierra floating around, some open-source projects out there none of which I was able to get working (for the open-source tools).

I just wanted to see if this already existed before I go down this path since I was quite sure something already existed in this realm...maybe not.

Thanks to anyone who can point me in the right direction.

-deckarep

7

SCI Development Tools / Can SCI script be modernized into the current age of programming languages?

« on: January 23, 2024, 11:38:22 PM »

Hey SCI Programming friends,

I've long dreamed of getting access to SCI scripts in a modern programming language. For a myriad of reasons really. I know the games can currently be manipulated via tools like SCICompanion and other open-source tools, and even some original tooling that got released over the years.

But even though I have mad respect for all the developers out there who have reverse engineered the Sierra games and built such tools. And even though I have mad respect for the original Sierra devs including the likes of Jeff Stephenson for creating the original SCI engine and kernel...what I don't like is reading an old Small-talk, Lisp style language with a bajillion parenthesis and prefix-notation for expressions. It makes my eyes bleed.

So what if SCI script was taken out of the stone-age and the games were modernized in such a way that the source code becomes easily readable/writable and usable with modern tooling and modern software conventions?

See this Github gist for more details including my rationale: https://gist.github.com/deckarep/a4af4b8b16851e65688a94f445fb1a8e

I welcome any comments and criticism of this effort. I have no illusions: it will be a hard task to get to a point where a game can run and I probably won't take it that far at least by myself.

The transpiler is not yet open-source...it's in an ugly state and I at least want to ensure it runs on a full game to completion.

Thanks,

-deckarep

8

SCI Development Tools / SCI Companion exporting instance definitions help.

« on: October 09, 2023, 02:41:33 PM »

Hello,

Can someone please clarify check my understanding on using SCI Companion 3.0 to edit game resources.

It's obvious to me that I can use the Script editor and make a change to a method and export this change as a patch file.

But what's less clear is how to make a change to a property of an instance within the script? If I change a property, say a view number for example and then I export the script as a patch file the game doesn't see these types of changes.

I feel like this has something to do with SCI 1.1 games using the heap resource as well. So do i need to also export the heap file as a patch as well? Do I need to edit the heaps manually using a hex editor or will editing the script definition cascade the change to the heap?

I appreciate if anyone can shed light on this process as I know I can do anything with a hex editor but I want to avoid that in this case because my changes are more complicated now.

Thank you in advance!

-deckarep

9

SCI Development Tools / King?s Quest 6 - New Hires Portrait hack (prototype)

« on: September 08, 2023, 01:57:39 AM »

Hello friends,

Awhile back ago I posted a quick and dirty script written in Go to extract the RAVE file format file images from the King?s Quest 6 Hires portrait files which I posted in the forum.

All that did was allow one to view the raw image PNG files which is nice but don't do much.

Well can we go in the opposite direction and come up with a way to encode all new character portraits?

Can we change, modify or enrich the palettes of these portraits?

Can we introduce all the necessary voice graphics to represent character talking animations?

Here's the beginnings of a proof-of-concept to answer this question.

Much more details in the YouTube description.

Cheers,

-deckarep

I'll likely open source whatever hacked together tools I come up with.

10

SCI Development Tools / Quick and dirty script to extract King's Quest 6 .bin files

« on: October 07, 2022, 05:47:05 PM »

Hello fellow SCI programming community,

I'm new around here but definitely not new to Sierra or their awesome games.

I just wanted to share a script that perhaps someone might find useful one day and I also bring a long a question.

1. Here's a link to a tool for extracting the first embedded character portrait bitmap of a KQ6 .bin file. The script was a super quick/dirty hack and doesn't yet properly parse the entire file which also includes synchronization data but it's a start. The code is written in the Go programming language. Perhaps others find it useful because I was not able to find anything that existed already from the community.

https://gist.github.com/deckarep/d09e98827945208db3bd4770f1256235

2. Is anyone aware of other Sierra games which had .bin files featuring character portraits other than KQ6? I only know of KQ6 which supported these files on the original Windows version of the game.

If anyone is curious why I'm bothering with this is because I'm putting together a fan-inspired project to build a playing card deck featuring the artwork of KQ6. I will likely do other Sierra games if there is more interest.

See my twitter @deckarep for more information and some screenshots!

Thanks!

-deckarep