Ultimate Broken Sword 2 Setup Guide

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GeorgeStobbart
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Ultimate Broken Sword 2 Setup Guide

Post by GeorgeStobbart »

Greetings Broken Sword Fans!

This is the ultimate Broken Sword 2 guide, showing you what files you need, where to put them, and how to compress the installation to save space.

The documentation doesn't explain how to lay out the directory structure when preparing Broken Sword 2 for ScummVM. It's also very vague about which files and directories you need, since it says that you have to copy all *.inf files, which is wrong and would give you useless files such as autorun.inf.

This has lead to some confusion and a fair amount of threads asking about all sorts of problems with figuring out how to lay out the Broken Sword 2 files. Therefore I've read through the ScummVM forums, documentation and double-checked in the source code and am going to explain exactly which files you need and where to put them. I wish someone had done that for me, which is why I am sharing this. That, and I really have nothing better to do. :wink:

This is how your final directory structure should look (under a folder called "sword2"):

Code: Select all

\clusters [directory]
\sword2 [directory]
\video [directory]
\clusters\carib1.clu
\clusters\carib2.clu
\clusters\carib3.clu
\clusters\cluster.tab
\clusters\credits.bmp
\clusters\credits.clu
\clusters\docks.clu
\clusters\font.clu
\clusters\general.clu
\clusters\jungle.clu
\clusters\music1.clu
\clusters\music2.clu
\clusters\paris.clu
\clusters\players.clu
\clusters\pyramid1.clu
\clusters\pyramid2.clu
\clusters\quaramon.clu
\clusters\resource.inf
\clusters\resource.tab
\clusters\scripts.clu
\clusters\speech1.clu
\clusters\speech2.clu
\clusters\text.clu
\clusters\warehous.clu
\sword2\cd.inf
\sword2\startup.inf
\video\carib.dxa
\video\carib.fla
\video\escape.dxa
\video\escape.fla
\video\eye.dxa
\video\eye.fla
\video\finale.dxa
\video\finale.fla
\video\guard.dxa
\video\guard.fla
\video\intro.dxa
\video\intro.fla
\video\jungle.dxa
\video\jungle.fla
\video\museum.dxa
\video\museum.fla
\video\pablo.dxa
\video\pablo.fla
\video\pyramid.dxa
\video\pyramid.fla
\video\quaram.dxa
\video\quaram.fla
\video\river.dxa
\video\river.fla
\video\sailing.dxa
\video\sailing.fla
\video\shaman.dxa
\video\shaman.fla
\video\stone1.dxa
\video\stone2.dxa
\video\stone2.fla
\video\stone3.dxa
\video\stone3.fla
You ONLY need the files listed above. Everything else is junk and won't get used by ScummVM! Therefore you should check the list above for reference while you are copying the necessary files.

This guide applies to both the ORIGINAL 1997 CDs, and the "Sold Out Software" release. The files are identical on both, but with the Sold Out version you have to install the game to your harddrive and copy the data files from the installation folder (because they are packaged into .cab files on the CD), while the original 1997 CDs have all the files right on the CD and you can copy them straight off there without installing the game.

Now for detailed descriptions:

\clusters:
The files under the \clusters directory come from the \clusters directories on your two Broken Sword II CDs. However, the music and speech files from both CDs have conflicting names, so rename speech.clu and music.clu to speechX.clu and musicX.clu, where X is the CD that particular file came from; as an example, speech.clu from CD1 would be renamed to speech1.clu. There are four other cluster files with conflicting names that exist on both CDs, but these remaining files are all completely identical so you can use the ones from either CD.

\sword2:
The \sword2 directory is found on CD1, and you should ONLY copy the cd.inf and startup.inf files from there. The ScummVM readme says that startup.inf is optional, but that's only semi-true since it is actually used for the debug menu and therefore you should keep it. The readme really shouldn't be calling it optional since there is a use for it.

\video:
The files in this directory come from the Broken Sword II Cutscene Pack (Sword2_DXA_Cutscenes.zip).

**********************************************************
Edit by md5: This is relevant for older versions of ScummVM only. ScummVM is now able to decode the original Smacker videos of the game (smk file extension), so you can just copy them off the game's CD. It cannot decode the MPEG2 videos of some releases, so you'll only need the DXA cutscene pack for these versions.
**********************************************************

You have to download the cutscenes instead of using the ones on the CDs, because ScummVM cannot decode the original cutscene videos due to licensing issues with the Smacker Video format. This cutscene pack contains re-encoded cutscenes in the lossless DXA format. Simply extract this 111MB zip file into the \video folder and you're done, unless you are going to be playing on a slow device. In that case, delete all the *.fla files (they contain FLAC audio which is CPU intensive), and download the OGG Vorbis Audio replacement (Sword2_OGG_Cutscenes.zip) and extract it into the \video folder. This gives you OGG Vorbis audio files instead, which takes up much less processing power for a pretty much indistinguishable quality loss (the original audio files were lo-fi to begin with, we're not dealing with audiophile stuff here :wink:). Also note that the OGG files are about 10MB smaller than the FLAC files, so even if your device has the CPU power to play FLAC audio, you may still want the OGG audio files if you are tight on space.

You're done!
This is all there is to it, you can start playing now, or you can read on to find out how to also compress the game files. Make sure that you place the above directory structure under a folder called "sword2" and point ScummVM to it. It doesn't strictly have to be called "sword2" anymore since ScummVM now detects games based on file checksums instead of folder name, but it doesn't hurt to comply with the official naming standard. :P

Interestingly enough, the subfolders (meaning \video, \clusters and \sword2) don't actually have to be laid out in this way. You could put all files in a single folder if you wanted to since ScummVM searches for the necessary files in all subfolders. However, the above layout is the official layout so I suggest you use it for that reason alone.

-------------------------------------------------------------

BONUS Section: What about Compression?
The directory structure above takes up exactly 1 gigabyte. By compressing the speech and music you can almost halve that number. That's a very interesting proposition for those playing on limited-storage devices. :wink:

We'll be compressing the audio into the OGG Vorbis format. With slight changes to this guide you could encode the audio as MP3 instead; however, I highly recommend against using MP3 simply because OGG is a superior compression algorithm and sounds much better while producing smaller files. It is rare but possible that ScummVM for your intended device (if it is a low-powered one) doesn't support OGG Vorbis. In that case, you'll have to look up an MP3 conversion guide as that's beyond the scope of this tutorial.

Before we go on, make sure that you have about 2 gigabytes free space on the drive where you'll be doing the conversion.

Let's begin! Simply download the ScummVM Tools (scummvm-tools-0.11.0-win32.zip) and extract the file called compress_sword2.exe to a temporary working directory (can be anything, such as c:\scummtools). Next, download the Lancer version of OggEnc (this is a highly optimized version of OggEnc which supports multiple cores) from http://homepage3.nifty.com/blacksword/. The page is partly in Japanese, but simply scroll down to the heading that says "oggenc2.83" and pick the file that corresponds to your CPU capabilities (you can choose between sse/sse2/sse3 versions, or the highly recommended multithreaded "mt" versions of the sse2/sse3 versions). When you've picked the version you want, open the archive and extract the file called oggenc2.exe to your temporary working directory, then rename it to oggenc.exe (this is important!).

Now go into your \clusters folder and move the speech1.clu, speech2.clu, music1.clu, and music2.clu files to your temporary working directory. We could have done the conversion right in the \clusters folder, but since the compression process creates a lot of temporary files it would have been very messy, that's why we are doing it in a temporary folder.

Now it's time to make a .bat file so that you can run it and automatically compress all files without having to type the commands manually. Copy the following into a bat file called compress.bat and save it to the temporary working directory:

Code: Select all

@echo off
echo.
echo This batch file will compress the Broken Sword 2 audio files to save space.
echo.
echo Quality settings:
echo * Using OGG Vorbis (aoTuV b5 Lancer) at quality level 3 (64kbps)...
echo.
echo Press any key to begin compression...
pause >nul
compress_sword2.exe --vorbis -q 3 speech1.clu
compress_sword2.exe --vorbis -q 3 speech2.clu
compress_sword2.exe --vorbis -q 3 music1.clu
compress_sword2.exe --vorbis -q 3 music2.clu 
echo Process complete! Please verify that all four files were successfully created.
pause >nul
This batch file will compress the audio using OGG Vorbis (aoTuV b5 Lancer) at quality level 3 (64kbps). This is more than enough bitrate to make the finished files sound identical to the original audio, and we could even have settled for quality level 1 (32kbps).

Run the compress.bat file and step away from the computer; this will take a while depending on your CPU, and whether or not you use the multithreaded version of OggEnc! It took me about 16 minutes on an Intel Quad Core @ 2.4 GHz, and that's when using the highly optimized multithreaded version. Depending on your CPU this could take up to an hour.

Once the batch file has finished running you should end up with four new files in your temporary working directory: speech1.clg, speech2.clg, music1.clg, and music2.clg. If everything was successful and you have these four files then simply delete the original files since they are no longer necessary: speech1.clu, speech2.clu, music1.clu, and music2.clu. Move the four new *.clg files back to your \clusters folder and you're done!

Note that the compress_sword2 tool will only work with the four speech and music files, and will not work with any of the other *.clu files or any files from Broken Sword 1 (instead use compress_sword1 for that).

The uncompressed audio files take up 650mb, while the new OGG compressed files take up 191mb, that's 29% of what the size used to be!

These are the final setup sizes:
BS2 with uncompressed audio: 1.00 GB (1,084,674,379 bytes)
BS2 with ogg audio: 575 MB (603,926,318 bytes)


Have fun with a great piece of classic Adventure Gaming!
Last edited by GeorgeStobbart on Tue Mar 18, 2008 11:19 pm, edited 1 time in total.
fingolfin
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Post by fingolfin »

Very nice guide, thanks!
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Urd
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Post by Urd »

Very good guide!
The Datafiles-section should be updated according to this. ^^
but for me there are two questions remaining:
Are there Other compressed released from BS2?
I've go mine used, and so ony own a Jewel-Case with both cds.
and: Is the sold oud release from BS1 also compressed? does anybody know?
GeorgeStobbart
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Joined: Mon Mar 17, 2008 5:40 pm
Location: ABANDONED ACCOUNT

Post by GeorgeStobbart »

Urd wrote:Very good guide!
The Datafiles-section should be updated according to this. ^^
Thanks for your kind words! :wink:
Urd wrote:but for me there are two questions remaining:
Are there Other compressed released from BS2?
I'm not fully sure what you are asking. If you are asking if you can compress anything else (besides the four audio clusters) then the answer is No, because the other cluster files contain graphics and scripts. If ScummVM had supported Zipped games (as opposed to using a folder structure like it currently does), then the Ogg Vorbis compressed version above could be reduced even further, from 575 MB to 379 MB (zipped). This won't happen though, as there are too many negative performance aspects to zipping the entire game. There is a C++ library called ZZIPlib which supports transparent handling of zips as if the files were real files on the disk. Its functions take the same parameters as the regular posix functions open/read/close and is therefore an easy drop-in-replacement that completely handles everything for the program (simply rename each call to these functions to zzip_open/read/close instead), so that whenever a file is requested it first looks for the file as a regular file, and then looks for a zipfile named the same as the file, or in the case of requesting a directory path it looks for the zip file corresponding to this path. As an example, if the program requests to open /games/monkey2/monkey2.000 it would first look for the real file, then try to find /games/monkey2.zip/monkey2.000 and finally /games.zip/monkey2/monkey2.000 (don't quote me on the order but this is the kind of operation it performs). However, since the data files from most games are so large this kind of real-time reading would probably not be feasible.
Urd wrote:I've go mine used, and so ony own a Jewel-Case with both cds.
and: Is the sold oud release from BS1 also compressed? does anybody know?
Let me check if the data files from the "Sold Out" version of Broken Sword 1 are already pre-compressed... I have the original 1997 Broken Sword 2 and the "Sold Out" version of Broken Sword 1 (because I had sold my original copy in 1997 :(). I'll get back to you when I am home and have checked the Broken Sword 1 CDs. I highly doubt that they would have compressed the original files though.
Last edited by GeorgeStobbart on Thu Mar 20, 2008 10:41 am, edited 2 times in total.
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Urd
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Post by Urd »

What I meant:
You said that the Sold Out Version of BSII Containes Compressed files on the CD, so that it is recommended to Install the game and use this files instead those from the cd.
My Question is: are there Other known releases from BS2 (others then the sold out and the original release), and, if they exist, are those cmpressed(as sould out release) or are they uncompressed (as the original release)

I Hope this is better to understand. ^
GeorgeStobbart
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Post by GeorgeStobbart »

Urd wrote:What I meant:
You said that the Sold Out Version of BSII Containes Compressed files on the CD, so that it is recommended to Install the game and use this files instead those from the cd.
My Question is: are there Other known releases from BS2 (others then the sold out and the original release), and, if they exist, are those cmpressed(as sould out release) or are they uncompressed (as the original release)

I Hope this is better to understand. ^
First off, I have to say Oops :oops:, I'm back home and found that I still have the original Broken Sword 1 CDs that I bought in 1996. I haven't looked at the CDs in years (thanks ScummVM!) and was confusing it with some of the many "Sold Out" game CDs I have. That was certainly a happy surprise! I even have the first version of the game, the one where it was called Circle of Blood and not Broken Sword! (otherwise identical except for the box :)). Funny. Oh well, back to your question.

Turns out it was a simple misunderstanding. When I said that the files on the "Sold Out" CDs were compressed, I meant compressed as in "packed inside an installer". The "Sold Out" data files are unmodified and identical to what is on the original Broken Sword 2 CDs, but they are inside .cab files instead (kind of like zip files). That is the only reason why you have to install the "Sold Out" release to the HD first, so that you may access the real files (they get unpacked to wherever you install the game). Simply install Broken Sword 2 and then follow the guide, taking the files out of the "Sold Out" installation dir.

I'll change the words from "because they are compressed on the CD" to "because they are packaged into .cab files on the CD" to avoid any future confusion. :)
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Kaminari
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Post by Kaminari »

I think you can open CAB files with 7zip or WinRAR. I don't remember installing my SoldOut version in order to extract the files from BS2.
GeorgeStobbart
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Post by GeorgeStobbart »

Kaminari wrote:I think you can open CAB files with 7zip or WinRAR. I don't remember installing my SoldOut version in order to extract the files from BS2.
Could you please check if that's the case? My comments about the "Sold Out" version are based on a post on these forums stating that you have to install the "Sold Out" version because they had packed all the data files along with ScummVM into .cab files on the CDs. Do you have the DVD or CD version of the "Sold Out" release?

Regarding extraction; CAB files are a tricky area because most of them cannot be opened using 7zip/WinRAR. These two programs only support "real" CABs of the standardized Microsoft type (MS-CAB). However, most installers are built with programs such as InstallShield, and the resulting CAB files use proprietary formats specific to the installer software. That makes them unreadable.

In other news, I'm considering making guides for more games, starting with Broken Sword 1.
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id1402
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Post by id1402 »

CAB files, which cannot be opened using 7zip/WinRAR, can be opened with I5comp or I6comp. There are differnet versions of CAB files depending on the version of InstallShield. So some CAB files can be opened with I5comp, the others with I6comp.

I used I5comp to open CAB file used in "The Feeble Files" for example.

GeorgeStobbart
Interestingly enough, the subfolders (meaning \video, \clusters and \sword2) don't actually have to be laid out in this way.
This means that the subfolders can be called just as you want and you can place the files in it as you want?


You should correct "How much free time to I have?" to "How much free time do I have?"
Last edited by id1402 on Thu Mar 20, 2008 1:52 am, edited 1 time in total.
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sev
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Post by sev »

GeorgeStobbart, what do you think about putting your excellent guide to our Wiki as an ultimate source of all ScummVM-related documentation?


Eugene
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Urd
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Post by Urd »

ahhh ok, now i know what you ment ^^
Then i Can say, that neither the Sold out version of BS1, nor my used Jewel case of BS2 are storaged in .cab, because they have never seen a Windows PC from inside, I just copied all files to my HDD.
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id1402
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English OGG AddOn

Post by id1402 »

Hello.
I have a simple question on the cutscenes.
There is Broken Sword 2 Cutscene Pack (English OGG AddOn) on the download page. Why is it specially English? I thought the cutscenes only contain music and SFX without speech. For example there is no speech in intro.ogg/intro.fla, but in the game at the beginning there is music and SFX from intro.ogg/intro.fla besides speech und subtitles.
What is so English in Broken Sword 2 Cutscene Pack (English OGG AddOn)?
I would like to use this OGG files from English OGG AddOn in the German version of the game. Is that possible or would I face technical problems?
clem
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Re: English OGG AddOn

Post by clem »

id1402 wrote:Hello.
I have a simple question on the cutscenes.
There is Broken Sword 2 Cutscene Pack (English OGG AddOn) on the download page. Why is it specially English? I thought the cutscenes only contain music and SFX without speech. For example there is no speech in intro.ogg/intro.fla, but in the game at the beginning there is music and SFX from intro.ogg/intro.fla besides speech und subtitles.
What is so English in Broken Sword 2 Cutscene Pack (English OGG AddOn)?
I would like to use this OGG files from English OGG AddOn in the German version of the game. Is that possible or would I face technical problems?
As far as I know the video/audio is identical between different languages version of BS2, so I'd guess you can use the "English" ogg addon for the german version.

Should get renamed at the download page too I guess
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id1402
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Post by id1402 »

Thank you for fast answering.
The OGG Files from "English OGG AddOn" work well with German version (I only checked the intro until now).

So the download could be renamed from "English OGG AddOn" into "all languages OGG AddOn".
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Flac vs Ogg vs MP3 - CPU utilization

Post by trueg »

Hey GeorgeStobbart, I was interested in a comment you made about Flac being more CPU intensive to decode vs. Ogg. Do you have any examples of this? The reason I ask is because on my HTC Touch (Elfin), which has a 201 MHz TI OMAP 850, I've experienced the opposite.

The reason I would even care is that I'm in the process of compressing the files for Broken Sword 2 (I just finished Broken Sword 1 yesterday - Astraware version). Space isn't really a concern as I have an 8GB card, but I see no reason to waste space as long as there is no loss in quality and it doesn't effect battery life. I use BatteryStatus to scale down the CPU speed on the fly and save battery life. I would like to use the compression type that maintains quality and uses the lowest amount of CPU power.
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