New resource type discovered in SQ3 Mac

[lskovlun]

So I was looking at Sluicebox's newly released source, and discovered this innocuous comment:

Code: [Select]

                   // HACK: sq3-mac and hoyle2-mac have resources of type 0x8f (message)
                    // which are of course not message resources, so version detection throws.
                    // i don't know what they are, neither does scummvm.
                    // until i update MessageReader to detect and reject these, whatever they are,
                    // i'm just skipping attempting to parse messages from these two text games.
Intrigued, I took a look and I found that they are alternate views for some of the graphics, mostly but not quite black and white. About half of the views have corresponding "altviews"; so I'm guessing there must be some sort of conversion mechanism for the remainder. Now, as Kawa once said about 2-color graphics, they are a bit meh - but unlike the monochrome pics we discussed then, these views are often bigger than the originals. Compare:

[lskovlun]

(continued)

What I did here was extract the 0x8f resources (which scummvm thinks are message resources), rename them to view.* and fix the type tag so that the system knows they are views. Then they load without problems in SCI Companion (a few resources fail to load; I haven't investigated why). They contain a palette section, as SCI01 views do (and which QfG2 uses a lot for special effects).

[Kawa]

The increased size makes sense: Macs are known to have higher resolutions than most PCs (at least 512 by 342 native, against the average PC's 320 by 200 stretched).

[lskovlun]

Yeah, but I was thinking that a mixture of upscaled views and pics with redrawn ones would look bad. If nothing else because of the differences in art style that come from having more pixels (see Roger's eyes in the above for example). And those pics... the SCI flood-fill algorithm is rather sensitive, so just upscaling them could spell trouble.

[Kawa]

So I figured I'd check out MobyGames, see if they have any black-and-white Mac SQ3 screenshots. I only found color ones, but they sure raised some interesting questions in turn.

Check it out, here's the pod room on the Mac, and the DOS version scaled up to match.

(full disclosure: I removed the status line from both and an extra border from the Mac screenshot for the sake of comparison.)

[doomlazer]

Please post some of the B&W Pics if you extract them.

Were the B&W resources a scrapped attempt to support the Macintosh SE/30 (1989-1991)? What was the mac model that supported color in 1989? It's not really clear from a quick search.

[lskovlun]

There are no black and white pics as far as I can tell. That's why I wondered about the upscaling. But I'll post an example of that black-and-white-but-not-quite thing I talked about. The grabber is in black and white, but the strobe light was left untouched:

[doomlazer]

I'm counting 8 colors in that view, minus transparency. It kinda seems like early ego-in-shadow tests they forgot to delete in the mac version? Why the unknow resource format though? Sorry for all the edits.

Edit: here's my crazy theory (I know it's not correct at all):

The first color mac was released in 1993. SQ3 released in 1989, so the Mac version of SQ3 was developed while one of the Two Guys was working at Dynamix. They used some of the lesser understood dynamix formats. Why would they rework the shadow graphics though?

sq3mac2.png might be a remnant of B&W ES/30 compatibility?

[Kawa]

I have my doubts about it being specifically an "ego in shadow" thing because of the grabber.

[lskovlun]

If it was an art test, why would you create a new Mac-specific resource type for it, on a game port at that?