Messages

1

The Games and other Sierra Adventure stuff / Quest For Glory I – Macintosh Easter Egg

« on: Yesterday at 09:00:24 AM »

Just stumbled across this new blog post a couple days ago by Chris Benshoof.
https://www.benshoof.org/blog/quest-for-glory-i-macintosh-easter-egg

The topic's mainly about an exclusive easter egg hidden in the Mac version of QFG1.  But he also goes into some of the joys and challenges of decompiling the Mac sierra games in general and Quest For Glory 1 specifically (which was ported to Mac about 2 years after the PC release).

He also includes an attachment to bring the exclusive easter egg over to the PC version, which is neat.

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The Games and other Sierra Adventure stuff / Re: Rare SCI Games

« on: May 08, 2022, 10:40:29 PM »

On the original QFG Anthology CD release in 1996 includes the french documentation for QFG4, stating in the readme file:

Question: There is French documentation for QG4 in the \DOCO
directory on the QG Anthology CD, but there is no QG4 French game
on the CD.  Why?
Answer: The documentation was printed in French, but we never released
a French versionof QG4.  We included the French documentation on the
CD in case someone needed it.

The later 1997 QFG Collection re-release also includes the french QFG4 documentation, with a slightly rewritten FAQ answer:

Question: There is French documentation for QG4 in the \DOCO
directory on the QG Collection CD, but there is no QG4 French game
on the CD.  Why?
Answer: The documentation was printed in French, but we never released
a French version of QG4.  We included the French documentation on the
CD in case someone wanted to take a look at it.

3

AGI Development Tools / Re: Sierra's AGI Compiler (CG.EXE) Disassembled

« on: January 12, 2022, 09:23:53 AM »

If it's the same file OmerMor posted a couple years ago, the date is August 1, 1986 (10:29:58 AM).
CRC32: 022E711B
MD5: A70C533DCBDAA58491DD09A10AC1F251
SHA-1: 4700B789548A53FBE3600ADDB55E4B1C492436E0

http://sciprogramming.com/community/index.php?topic=1814.0

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SCI Syntax Help / Re: SCI0 - Pic Size Maximum?

« on: December 10, 2021, 11:57:35 AM »

Hah, I was just about to say that exact same thing.  It's the sort of thing that definitely makes me cringe when i see it, but hey, it's under the size limit (you said 43MB, but I think you meant 43KB).

I ran the converter myself and I have to say, I was impressed at how accurate it reproduced the original raster image.  Of course, I'm sure it helps that the original is already limited to 16 colours.  So, really whatever helps speed up the workflow.

EDIT: Also just realized that because the dithering is baked in, ScummVM's undither option won't do anything. Which I personally find a shame (although I think I'm in the minority with that opinion). Regardless, in a project like this, I do still believe workflow and time efficiency is king.  Really solid looking background, btw. Excited for your progress.

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SCI Syntax Help / Re: SCI0 - Pic Size Maximum?

« on: December 10, 2021, 08:49:58 AM »

Just out of curiosity, how do you convert a photoshop image into SCI0 format?

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SCI Syntax Help / Re: evKEYBOARD question

« on: October 28, 2021, 02:31:23 PM »

the full context of the code:

Code: [Select]

(and
    (< KEY_SPACE (event message?))
    (< (event message?) 127)
    (< local154 13)
)

Those event messages correspond to the ascii codes of the keys being pressed on the keyboard.  You can see a list of all ascii characters here: https://theasciicode.com.ar/

So basically it's checking that a valid key was pressed.  Nothing less than (and excluding) KEY_SPACE (aka 32) and nothing above 126, aka tilde (~).

7

SCI Development Tools / Re: resource.00x limitations

« on: October 20, 2021, 09:22:06 AM »

To quote my blog post on the subject:

[In SCI0] you get 64 diskettes to use with a maximum offset-in-volume of only 67,108,863.

With SCI11 ... you get an upper limit of 16,777,215, ...

and in SCI2 onwards it's the full 4,294,967,295 again.

Those offsets relate to byte size, right? So that gives us maximum RESOURCE.000 sizes of:

• SCI0 = 2^26 = 64MB
• SCI11 = 2^24 = 16MB
• SCI2 = 2^32 = 4GB

... wait, is that right? SCI0 can have larger resources than SCI11?

8

SCI Development Tools / Re: Rebuilding resource.000 with external patches

« on: August 08, 2021, 12:26:25 PM »

Oh, this sparks joy.    Thank you, Kawa!

Looks like it's capping out at 25 views at a time.  I think it's related to this: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/14903496/why-cfiledialoggetnextpathname-doesnt-work-when-the-file-path-is-long.

Not really a problem. Just means I needed to import 5 times instead of 112 times.

9

SCI Development Tools / Re: Rebuilding resource.000 with external patches

« on: August 08, 2021, 12:15:22 AM »

Honestly, I was tempted myself to attempt to modify the "Import patch file" menu item to allow selecting multiple files.  If multiple patches are selected, I'd skip the import dialog, and just use the default values.

Unfortunately I'm quite rusty in my C++, and don't want to take on another learning project. But if you do it, I'm very interested.

10

SCI Development Tools / Re: Rebuilding resource.000 with external patches

« on: August 05, 2021, 10:32:50 PM »

Ahah! Import patch file! I completely overlooked that. That's exactly what I was looking for. Thank you Kawa.

It's 185 or so I need to import, so not something I'd want to do often, but now that I know about the import option I can just import them as needed in the future.

11

SCI Development Tools / Re: Rebuilding resource.000 with external patches

« on: August 05, 2021, 12:12:27 AM »

Ah yes, I remember the discussion of that option a few years back -- I was kinda hoping there'd be a way without me substantially altering my workflow. Toggling the "Manage resources as patch files" has some pretty serious consequences that I wasn't looking to implement at this stage.

I'm using Kawa's build v3.2.3.0, btw.

Toggling it on has a fairly lengthy pause while it extracts each resource to an external patch file -- not sure if it overwrote any existing patch files with their (older) internal resource counterpart -- also not really sure if there were any overlapping files there... it's been nearly a year since I touched this mod.

Once all the patch files were extracted, the Explorer only showed patch files, not any files already existing in resource.000. But Tools-->Rebuild resources seems to have worked as I'd wanted.

Trouble is when I uncheck the "Manage resources as patch files" to change things back to how I had it before, it's asking me for confirmation after it deletes every single script file.  It also asks if I want to delete the corresponding script source code (thank goodness that's not checked by default).

I'm just going to hard-crash SCICompanion and restore from the zip I made beforehand -- I don't feel like clicking yes on 285 individual confirmation dialogs tonight. It'd be really nice if the Rebuild resources window itself could just build those patch files in without needing "Manage resources as patch" enabled.

12

SCI Development Tools / Rebuilding resource.000 with external patches

« on: August 04, 2021, 04:58:51 PM »

Is there any easy way to rebuild a resource.000 with all the external patch files?

I thought Tools-->Rebuild resources did it, but it looks like that just removes duplicates from within the resource itself, not adding in any additional patch files.  I feel like I'm missing something obvious.

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SCI Development Tools / Re: Decompilation Archive

« on: July 08, 2021, 10:23:44 AM »

Yup, makes total sense. I was just on a different line of thought -- I forgot the Larry Nick's Pick's was called Larry's Casino, and assumed Eric had moved on to another game after mentioning the difficulties with Nick's Picks in general.

EDIT: Just took a look through my collection, and turns out that's the only Nick's Pick floppy I don't have.  Guess I never really played that one after all. Certainly knew of it's existence though.

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SCI Development Tools / Re: Decompilation Archive

« on: July 07, 2021, 04:22:48 PM »

Hah, thank you for clarify it, because until you said otherwise I still thought it was the 1998 one.

All I could think was: "Ohh, a mix of LSL1 and LSL5? I would have thought LSL7. Oh well, that's a peculiar bit of trivia."

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SCI Community News / Re: Space Quest IV – Easter Eggs: Great post by sluicebox

« on: April 22, 2021, 08:45:34 AM »

Yeah, I consumed my lunch break yesterday doing the same.  That was some incredible detective work, tracing a 30-year old copy protection hack.

Thanks for sharing sluicebox's blog, OmerMor.