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.
Category: ScummVM
bookmark_borderYearly Update, Part I: ScummVM
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).
bookmark_borderAll Beauty Must End
Yesterday, I implemented the last remaining bit Urban Runner needed for 16bit graphics support, making all my dithering exploits useless. 🙂 Continue reading “All Beauty Must End”
bookmark_borderFascination is alive!
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!
bookmark_borderSome progress with Fascination
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 😛
bookmark_borderAnother Dark Seed II video…
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) 😉 :
bookmark_borderI can walk! It’s a miracle!
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:
bookmark_borderAn inconvenience solved
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.
bookmark_borderThe aforementioned cursor inconvenience
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. Continue reading “The aforementioned cursor inconvenience”
bookmark_borderA non-gob-y Squidmas
Just on time for this blog’s first anniversary (quite scary, especially considering that there weren’t that many posts ^^) and ChristSquidmas, I come to you with a status update.
So, what have I been doing the past months? Apart from some RL stuff I’d rather not talk about, and playing Dominion (seriously, check that out, it’s really great), I didn’t do much concerning gob. Sorry. Instead, I started a new ScummVM engine, for Dark Seed II. Continue reading “A non-gob-y Squidmas”