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.
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).
Yesterday, I implemented the last remaining bit Urban Runner needed for 16bit graphics support, making all my dithering exploits useless. 
read more »
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!
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 
For anyone following #scummvm, this is old news: Strangerke, who’s been in contact with the original Coktel Vision developers, has found out the real name of their engine. “DEV”.
Now, I happen to think that this is a bloody stupid name (no offence to the original team meant, of course). People around me seem to agree.
Also, I’ve gotten used to “gob” and this blog’s name wouldn’t work with “DEV” 
. Therefore, the engine in ScummVM will keep being called “gob”. For now, anyway .
Just a quick overview of the latest developments for people interested in Fascination (I know you’re out there, you’ve been bothering me for some time now ).
Well, here’s my final follow-up to the dithering stuff.
I actually grew a bit weary of fiddling with it, so pardon me that this post won’t be long. This will also be my last one about this, too… read more »
This is just a quick follow-up to the dithering post.
Firstly: Yeah, it’s kinda late. Unfortunately, I have been busy with RL and didn’t have much time to work on Gob.
Secondly: Sorry Seldon, but I didn’t get much out of your posts. As far as I understood, it’ll only lead to a lookup that’s far too complex for my needs. The point is a bit moot now anyways, as you can see below. But thanks all the same!
The actual reason reason for this blog entry is that I did fiddle with the code a bit, though. In some spare minutes, I’ve asked my coworkers/bosses about my problem and they’ve suggested using a more crude approximation of the distance function, namely
ABS(x1 – x2) + ABS(y1 – y2) + ABS(z1 – z2)
This would remove the need for the costly multiplication. Whether it still looks good is a thing to try out. Which I did, and it does. read more »
Well… Apparently, I’ve finally given in to peer pressure and started my own ScummVM-related blog… You can stop smirking like that, clone! ;P
I doubt many people will read this, but it’ll give me a place to vent when I’ve found another stupid (or vile, in many cases) thing in the disassembly of one of the Coktel Vision games. Maybe something I write here will even be educational, interesting and/or funny to some people — not very likely, but we’ll see…