Status of SCI games

General chat related to ScummVM, adventure gaming, and so on.

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md5
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Post by md5 »

Raziel wrote:I wanted to say thank you to waltervn especially and to all the devs for making the first MIDI output in SCI games work :-D

SQIII doesn't sound quite as good as it did in FreeSCI but development will get this fixed aswell

Thank you guys, one step closer to a perfect ScummVM for me
The MIDI patches are not yet loaded properly for SQ3, which explains why it sounds odd - the patch format has been changed in SCI1.1, which is what is supported currently. Just be patient till it's done ;)
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MeddlingMonk
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Post by MeddlingMonk »

md5 wrote:
Raziel wrote:Just be patient till it's done ;)
So many have said that, yet so few listen. :roll:

Still, speaking as someone who likes to play around with SVN builds, it's nice to see how much work is going on into SCI. Having been absorbed by the giant amoeba that is ScummVM seems to have done the old FreeSCI effort a lot of good.
Wolfmage
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Post by Wolfmage »

Just been enjoying the latest wince trunk build on my HD2. It's so cool to play my favourite old Sierra series such as QFG, SQ, PQ and Jones on my phone. I own all these and more btw, with original floppies.

I've had a few crashes here and there, but most worked great. Point and click seems more suited for the touch screen, so it's a big improvement over just AGI. The HD2's limited hardware buttons hurt you with some games, but you can get by in most cases using the inbuilt keyboard.

Great job. This is awesome.
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lazylazyjoe
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Post by lazylazyjoe »

I own all these and more btw, with original floppies.
Do your floppies still work? Almost all my floppies from the 90's don't work. Fortunately, when I got my first backup device, a Syquest 250MB drive, I backed most of them up then kept transferring them from HD to HD. I think I have a CD floating around some where too with them on it.
scoriae
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Post by scoriae »

I haven't had a problem with my floppies working. I have most sierra games in 3.5 and 5.25 versions (depending on what was available). I last went through my collection and dumped them about 2 years ago and had no problems other then with a game I had gotten off of eBay recently. Maybe the arid desert air helps ;)
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MusicallyInspired
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Post by MusicallyInspired »

Ah the good old days when installing games to a hard drive was optional...or not even an option.
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lazylazyjoe
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Post by lazylazyjoe »

I'm trying to think back to using an apple II and Commodore 64 when I was young. Those didn't even have hard drives.
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Raziel
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Post by Raziel »

md5 wrote:
Raziel wrote:I wanted to say thank you to waltervn especially and to all the devs for making the first MIDI output in SCI games work :-D

SQIII doesn't sound quite as good as it did in FreeSCI but development will get this fixed aswell

Thank you guys, one step closer to a perfect ScummVM for me
The MIDI patches are not yet loaded properly for SQ3, which explains why it sounds odd - the patch format has been changed in SCI1.1, which is what is supported currently. Just be patient till it's done ;)
YES

Thanks to all involved

Perfect MIDI on SQ3 :-D
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Kaminari
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Post by Kaminari »

Bob Siebenberg goodness.
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MeddlingMonk
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Post by MeddlingMonk »

lazylazyjoe wrote:I'm trying to think back to using an apple II and Commodore 64 when I was young. Those didn't even have hard drives.
My first computer was a Commodore Vic 20. It didn't even have a floppy drive. It used audio cassettes for saving data. Completely bonkers.
hippy dave
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Post by hippy dave »

our first computer was an amstrad cpc which also ran off tapes (tho we got a floppy drive for it at a later date). my dad also had stacks of punch cards lying around, which were used by the mainframes when he worked at ibm years before. computer data actually represented by holes in pieces of card, amazing.
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eriktorbjorn
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Post by eriktorbjorn »

MeddlingMonk wrote: My first computer was a Commodore Vic 20. It didn't even have a floppy drive. It used audio cassettes for saving data. Completely bonkers.
My parents had an ABC80. That one used cassettes too. There was a floppy drive available for it, but it cost about twice as much as the computer itself.
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Red_Breast
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Post by Red_Breast »

Whilst we're on the subject of My First PC , and nobody's complaining about problems with SCI games, then I'll mention my first PC.
It was made by Schneider. It was purchased in Germany. It was actually an Amstrad CPC but re-branded.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amstrad_CP ... r_Division
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MeddlingMonk
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Post by MeddlingMonk »

I think we can tie the subject of old computers in with SCI. Or not. I was about to go on a rant about the perils of playing an early King's Quest game on an Apple II with a monochrome (think dying if you step off the path and being unable to really see that there is a path) but then realized that was an AGI game. I think I'd gone on to some kind of x86 machine by the time the SCI engine came along.

And here's mostly random but horrible thought: the massive number of punch cards that would have been needed to hold the code of today's games.
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lazylazyjoe
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Post by lazylazyjoe »

Here's some numbers...
The standard IBM cards were 80x12, so that's 960 punches/bits per card. That would take 786,097,767 to fill a standard cd. Stacked directly on top of each other they would stand 86.85 miles high.

IBM has a new punchcard, well 4 years old, called millipede. The punches (actually indentations so it can be erased/overwirtten) are just 10nm in diameter. That's one trillion bits per square inch. That's quite a difference.
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