Of Geishas and AdLib music

Posted in Fascination, Geisha, Gob, ScummVM on June 13th, 2012 by DrMcCoy – Comments Off

As I mentioned in Part I of what I half-jokingly called my “yearly update”, Geisha was only missing two hard-coded minigames, so it was kind of a low-hanging fruit to get supported. Unfortunately, as happens very often with me, I didn’t actually finish implemented those minigames just then, turning instead to other projects of mine.

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Yearly Update, Part II: eos

Posted in eos, xoreos on December 25th, 2011 by DrMcCoy – 26 Comments

[Minor Update: Because of name clashes, eos has been renamed to xoreos.]

As promised in my last post, I will now talk about eos.

“What is eos?”, I hear you ask. Well, in short, it’s an open source project I started to portably reimplement BioWare‘s 3D engines, starting with Neverwinter Night‘s Aurora engine. Quite a daring task, and one I can’t begin to hope to finish on my own, especially since I’m not really that versed in all that 3D stuff. But working on it is fun and scratches an itch, and maybe more people will join me in that particular quest some day.

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Yearly Update, Part I: ScummVM

Posted in Dark Seed II, Fascination, Geisha, Gob, ScummVM, Urban Runner on December 23rd, 2011 by DrMcCoy – 1 Comment

Well, it’s been a year since you’ve last heard from me, so I thought an update on what I’ve been doing is in order.
As this will be a tad longer, I’ll do that in two parts: This here first post will cover ScummVM-related things, while the next post will talk about eos (which you might not have heard about yet).

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All Beauty Must End

Posted in Gob, ScummVM, Urban Runner on January 17th, 2011 by DrMcCoy – 10 Comments

Yesterday, I implemented the last remaining bit Urban Runner needed for 16bit graphics support, making all my dithering exploits useless. :) read more »

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Fascination is alive!

Posted in Fascination, Gob, ScummVM on August 23rd, 2010 by Strangerke – Comments Off

In the previous post, I wrote that I’ll try to give some news about Fascination progress before the summer. I tried :)

More seriously, the good news came very recently: in less than two weeks, with the impressive help of SylvainTV, all the versions of Fascination became playable and completable, or at least all the ones I possess.

The main thing missing currently, only used by PC versions of the game, is the AdLib player (and IMHO, the SoundBlaster sounds a lot better). There’s a wrong delay (too short) between rooms in several places of most versions. This seems to be caused by the delay required at the time to load from the floppies, and it’s easily patchable.

Last detail, the (rare) CD version still requires a tool for the STK extraction. joostp is cleaning it up, and will commit it when it’ll be in a good state.

Maybe it’s a good time now to grab your originals and send us some feedback on the game, specially if you find some of those too short delays!

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Some progress with Fascination

Posted in Fascination, Gob, ScummVM on February 6th, 2010 by Strangerke – 2 Comments

Finally, the support of Fascination is showing some interesting progress! These last two weeks, the window behavior has been fixed, the hotspots correctly handled in them, and it’s now even possible to play through some levels. DrMcCoy even added a save/load function that works perfectly! There are still a lot of glitches in the floppy versions (almost none in the CD version) and it’s not completable for various reasons, depending on the platform and language concerned.

Here are some screenshots of the CD version.

Stay tuned for further news! I promise I’ll try to give some before this summer :P

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Another Dark Seed II video…

Posted in Dark Seed II on January 1st, 2010 by DrMcCoy – 16 Comments

Hey, here’s another small video, this time with Mike walking in-game (without pathfinding) and talking to Hank in the diner. Also a nice showcase for most of the remaining graphical glitches (highlighted in the annotations) ;) :

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I can walk! It’s a miracle!

Posted in Dark Seed II, ScummVM on December 29th, 2009 by DrMcCoy – Comments Off

Instead of continuing working, I’ll rather goof and play around with video capturing ;) . So you can now gaze at some working Mike walking animations:

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An inconvenience solved

Posted in Dark Seed II, ScummVM on December 27th, 2009 by DrMcCoy – Comments Off

Just a minor update: Thanks to sev, who pointed me to the right place in the wine sources, I managed to solve the cursor inconvenience :) .

The problem was, of course, my own damn fault; I misunderstood the nature of cursor resources. They’re not, as I assumed, plain cursors, one by one each taking up a resource entry. Instead, there are cursor groups, each capable of possessing a variable amount of cursor images. That isn’t even a quirk of NE files, it’s like that in PE files as we well, so my complaining about the executables being in that old format doesn’t apply either. Mea culpa.

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The aforementioned cursor inconvenience

Posted in Dark Seed II, ScummVM on December 26th, 2009 by DrMcCoy – 4 Comments

In the previous post, I mentioned an inconvenience with the cursors. Here’s the gist of it:

In Dark Seed II, the cursors are embedded into the resource part of the Windows 3.x (NE, “New Executable”) executable dark0001.exe. Specs are available on the Microsoft website, but they don’t quite match the executable, which claims that each cursor is only 32 byte big. read more »

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