Necronomicon 2xCD version experience

[Red_Breast]

I was on my Linux (Mint) box and read about Necronomicon The Dawning of Darkness being added to scummvm.
I compiled scummvm with all engines and added the game which showed up as "Unknown Level 9 game or version (v3)" and was getting "ERROR Unable to locate valid Level 9 game in file: Compiler.dat!" in the console when trying to play the game.

I thought I'll fire up Windows (11) and downloaded the binary that is linked to in the news item about this game where it says "Grab your portion of the ScummVM daily build".
I actually tried both "ScummVM latest Branch master" and "ScummVM stable Future 3.0.x".
But again I am getting the same error as above.

This was with the 2xCD version. Each CD has a "Data" folder. I tried copying from both of the data folders into a single folder on my computer. I did notice that there are many files duplicated on both CDs and other files on both discs with the same name but different size in which case I used the version on the 2nd CD.

Anyway, seeing it cheap on Steam I purchased it and it started fine no problem.
I see in the Steam folder there are two folders, "Data" and "Data2" in the "NecroES" folder. It was the NecroES folder that I pointed scummvm to.

So I tried something with the CDs. I made a folder "necro". Inside I copied the Data folder from CD1 as well as the Data folder from CD2 but renamed the 2nd CD Data folder to Data2.
I pointed scummvm add game to my necro folder and got the dialog box with "ScummVM could not find any game in the specified directory!"
So I tried pointing scummvm first to the necro\Data folder. This still gave me the same error as the original error about Compiler.dat. I also tried pointing to necro\Data2. Same Compiler.dat error again.

I see the scummvm wiki has no info for required data files for the 2xCD version. I don't get on the Discord so I don't know if this problem is known about when it comes to the CD version. But anyway, it's out there now. After faffing about for the last hour at least my findings may be of some use.

[Praetorian]

I see in the Steam folder there are two folders, "Data" and "Data2" in the "NecroES" folder. It was the NecroES folder that I pointed scummvm to.

I think this is not right. You must have pointed ScummVM to the folder outside NecroES, ie. its parent folder, as per the instructions.

About the 2-CD version, I think there's a clue in the detection_tables file for the phoenixVR engine here:
https://github.com/scummvm/scummvm/blob ... bles.h#L48

Detection in this case looks for two files "script.pak" and "textes.txt" on the "top level" game folder (same as for the Steam version) but *also* looks for "cd1/Data/Script1.pak" and "cd2/Data/Script3.pak". So it *seems* that the layout it's expecting is:

Code: Select all

.
|   script.pak
|   textes.txt
|   (maybe some other files for the CDs -- compare to Steam here)
|       
+---cd1
|   +---Data
|           Script1.pak
|           (and all other files from the data folder of CD1)
|
|
\---cd2
    +---Data
            Script3.pak
            (and all other files from the data folder of CD2)

Edit: Then again, here in the compatibility list entry for Necronomicon it states that only Steam and GOG versions are supported, so maybe even the above layout wouldn't work.

[sev]

This is a WIP and not yet supported, unfortunately. We are gearing towards putting two directories, named `cd1` and `cd2` next to each other. Unfortunately, they cannot be merged because there are files with the same names but different content on both CDs.


Eugene