Will SCUMMVM support...

Post by **sev** » Fri Dec 30, 2005 9:43 pm

Angelus3K wrote:Any news on Grim Fandango being supported? (Grime? Residual?)

http://wiki.scummvm.org/index.php/Residual and http://wiki.scummvm.org/index.php/Residual_TODO

Eugene

John the adventurer · Post by **John the adventurer** » Sun Jan 01, 2006 2:01 pm

Happy new year to all!

I was seen those german freeware adventure games, and they seems interesting. I didn't know about this before

About those spanish aventure games... I didn't heard of them before too, they seems quite interesting.

About those little engines... I hope that can be added to ScummVM in the future. ScummVM can act very good at borg-manner because it's modulary designed, and the module programmers can forget the low level stuff most of time

About game engines: What about Snatcher and Policenauts? Both are very good adventure games click'n point style, a few arcade stuff, but there are other games supported with that, and are japanese by Hideo Kojima! Both are interesting games to be supported because having an important fan movement and are "special" (cyberpunk stuff)

Kaminari · Post by **Kaminari** » Sun Jan 01, 2006 3:22 pm

John the adventurer wrote:What about Snatcher and Policenauts?

What a weird suggestion. I don't see ScummVM supporting Japanese digital comics anytime soon.

Snatcher is playable on Magic Engine. If you're talking about the Genesis port, then you can run it on Gens or Kega. PC-88 version? Use M88. MSX version? Try BlueMSX. The PSX/Saturn versions present no interest whatsoever.

Policenauts, well... You can run it on 3DO/PSX/saturn emulators. If you're interested in the original, superior PC-98 version, then you'll have to use a dedicated emu like Anex, Neko or T-98 Next. Worth the hassle, but again, nothing to do with ScummVM.

John the adventurer · Post by **John the adventurer** » Sun Jan 01, 2006 3:37 pm

Kaminari wrote:
What a weird suggestion. I don't see ScummVM supporting Japanese digital comics anytime soon.

What do you mean? They seems to me click'n point adventure games, just different genre because being japanese?

What do you mean exactly with "Japanese digital comics"?

Kaminari wrote: Policenauts, well... You can run it on 3DO/PSX/saturn emulators. If you're interested in the original, superior PC-98 version, then you'll have to use a dedicated emu like Anex, Neko or T-98 Next. Worth the hassle, but again, nothing to do with ScummVM.

Why not? It seems click'n point adventure game too, no?

db92 · Post by **db92** » Tue Jan 03, 2006 3:55 pm

actually, what is scummvm all about? running lucasarts games, running point and click games only or it can be adjusted to other certain engines as well? for example a nice thing with scummvm(psp port and other ports) would be to run 3d adventure games as well, such as atlantis for example... the atlantis: the new world i mean with chiara mastroyanni...

Post by **eriktorbjorn** » Tue Jan 03, 2006 4:28 pm

db92 wrote:actually, what is scummvm all about? running lucasarts games, running point and click games only or it can be adjusted to other certain engines as well? for example a nice thing with scummvm(psp port and other ports) would be to run 3d adventure games as well, such as atlantis for example... the atlantis: the new world i mean with chiara mastroyanni...

Well, ScummVM obviously already supports plenty of non-LucasArts games. But the backend does make certain assumptions, e.g. that the game uses 256-colour bitmapped graphics. (There are a few exceptions to the 256-colour rule, but let's not go into that.) Retro-fitting a 3D-engine would probably be quite awkward. It's worth noting that Residual is a separate project, even though Grim Fandango shares some features with later SCUMM games.

At least at the moment, I'd say it's unlikely that ScummVM will ever support anything else than 2D point-and-click adventure-ish games. And of course, the most important rule is that there has to be enough interested deverlopers to do the hard work of supporting the game.

clem · Post by **clem** » Tue Jan 03, 2006 7:32 pm

(I bet you expected such a post:)

what are the exceptions to the 256-color rule? is there anything in high-color in there?

clem

Post by **sev** » Tue Jan 03, 2006 8:11 pm

clem wrote:what are the exceptions to the 256-color rule?

Among currently supported games there are several 16 colors EGA games, 21 colors Amiga, and we can mimic original CGA and Hercules dithering for several games, that is 4 and 2 colors respectively.

clem wrote: is there anything in high-color in there?

Yes, there is, and we already had a brief discussion about need to make support for 16-bits. So far it went nowhere further my head and several discussions with Kirben. I still have to write it down to the Wiki. Those are latter Humongous Entertainment games at the moment. See this link. Currently there are enlisted 3 games, but in fact there is more.

The problem with this is that it will require review of whole SCUMM engine, and goals should be that there could exist 8-bit builds with no or neglective impact on memory useage and performace. I think that could be achieved with use of templates and some other ideas. Maybe I really have to descrive that on Wiki and maybe someone else will come with a better idea.

Eugene

Post by **eriktorbjorn** » Wed Jan 04, 2006 1:21 am

clem wrote:(I bet you expected such a post:)

what are the exceptions to the 256-color rule? is there anything in high-color in there?

clem

The Broken Sword cutscenes are drawn on the 16-bit "overlay" usually used by the GUI. I don't know if that's the only example currently -- when I wrote about the exceptions, I was thinking about something else, but I was probably thinking wrong.

john_doe · Post by **john_doe** » Mon Jan 09, 2006 12:06 pm

A little status report on Orion Burger and Toonstruck:

Nick Porcino, one of the lead programmers on Orion Burger replied to my mail and told me he has the source on some backup CD. He's looking for it and will send it as soon as possible.

With Toonstruck, sadly no one replied to any of my mails

But it seems to use a similar engine to Kyrandia, at least the scripts use exactly the same opcodes and the PAK files have the same format. The only difference with the scripts is c1_execOpcode which calls different functions than Kyrandia.
I also figured out the SPCN and LZSS compression schemes used to compress background graphics and sprite data.
As the game exe still contains the names of the commands that can be called with the c1_execOpcode opcode I at least know what each function is supposed to do.

joachimeberhard · Post by **joachimeberhard** » Mon Jan 09, 2006 1:27 pm

john_doe wrote:I at least know what each function is supposed to do.

And you don't have interest to try to implement it yourself?
I have the German version of Toonstruck, a very great game, and would like to see it run in ScummVM too!

After all, ScummVM is opensource and everyone is welcome to participate or at least submit a patch.

Sadly, I'm no developer, so I can only help with bugreports and a little support-help here in the forum, and my donations every 3 months that I plan to make regulary.

Best regards

Joachim

john_doe · Post by **john_doe** » Mon Jan 09, 2006 1:33 pm

Yes, I'm playing around with it and will try to implement it when I know enough.

joachimeberhard · Post by **joachimeberhard** » Mon Jan 09, 2006 1:51 pm

john_doe wrote:Yes, I'm playing around with it and will try to implement it when I know enough.

Thanks a lot!

clem · Post by **clem** » Mon Jan 09, 2006 8:49 pm

But it seems to use a similar engine to Kyrandia, at least the scripts use exactly the same opcodes and the PAK files have the same format. The only difference with the scripts is c1_execOpcode which calls different functions than Kyrandia.

Kyrandia 2: Hand of Fate also uses the same script opcodes with different exec_opcode numbers

there's the dekyra tool in CVS but it works somehow unreliably for me; maybe there could be one disassembler for all similar games?

clem

Vinterstum · Post by **Vinterstum** » Tue Jan 10, 2006 6:31 pm

john_doe wrote:Yes, I'm playing around with it and will try to implement it when I know enough.

Excellent!

We're going to have to objectify the Kyra engine at some point anyway in preparation for HoF, if Toonstruck uses a fairly similar engine we'd have a good common base for it.