Thursday, January 28, 2010

eBay Weirdness

Every once in a while, I check on eBay for a few games that I either find interesting, might help ScummVM in some way, or because I'm trying to track one down. I was looking for Mac versions of Sierra games, and at one point I happened to scroll down to the bottom of the screen and something caught my eye. "Leisure Suit Larry" (along with "Lego Batman") was mentioned on the bottom of the screen:


Bewildered as to what that link could possibly mean, I clicked on it and it lead me to here. Apparently Leisure Suit Larry is a popular item on eBay. Or something. I don't really get it. Not to mention none of the products listed below the description are even related to LSL.

</random blog post>

EDIT (2/3/10): My continued eBay searching has left me somewhat confused. Sometimes the item is just ridiculous, sometimes the price is just ridiculous. Since I don't want to just create another post, here are a few oddities I have found:

- King's Quest I CD: In addition to the high price... "replaced with the CD version"
- King's Quest V FM-Towns: High price. I would love to have it to be able to support it though! (Will accept a donation :P)
- Indiana Jones FM-Towns... Phone Card: Self-explanatory
- LucasArts Japanese Mac Pack: I would love to have this too (not as much as KQ5 FM-Towns), but I don't want to spend this kind of money...
- Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade: Seems normal... until you see what it comes with.

And, the icing on the cake:

- King's Quest VI "Girl in the Tower" CD: My jaw dropped when I saw this one. Yours probably will too. The price pretty much tells all. But it has free shipping!!!!


In other news, I've been tinkering with the Mohawk QuickTime code and working on adapting it to the Graphics::VideoDecoder interface in ScummVM. The more I do this, the more it feels like shoehorning the features that QTPlayer has into VideoDecoder isn't working. In addition, md5 mentioned that IHNM Mac uses QuickTime MIDI files. Curious as to what that involved, I looked up some samples on the internet. They use the good bad ol' QuickTime format to hold its own MIDI format (I had hoped for SMF in a QuickTime wrapper). Here's what Apple's QuickTime specs said about it. Anyone out there have better info than that?

Friday, January 01, 2010

The Year We Make Contact

And so, 2009 comes to a close. For those of you who have a good memory, you might remember a post I made last year about what I had hoped to accomplish this year. Let's take a look:

2009 Goals: (In order of probable completion)
- Fix Cinepak decoder!
- Fix QuickTime IMA ADPCM!
- Get background videos working!
- Figure out image format for other Mohawk games (Current hunch: LZSS similar to Myst format)!
- Finish Riven support (aka all the hardcoded puzzles :P)!

I have crossed out what was accomplished. Technically, I have a WIP patch that allows for background videos to work in Riven and background videos already work in Myst. So, we might consider that one done, even on a bit of a stretch. :P And now for next year:

2010 Goals: (In order of probable completion)
- Finish Riven support (external commands, mostly)
- Finish Myst support (some resource fixes, and then lots of the hardcoded opcodes)
- A look into other games more

Again setting lofty goals! We may even consider them monolithic in size! (Pun intended!) And for one last treat, to see the "good" ending of Riven, open the debug console in ScummVM (ctrl+d) and use these commands:

var ttelevalve 1
var ttelepin 1
var ttelecover 1
var pcage 2
changeStack tspit 137

Turn the lever down and press the button and voila! (Note: The DVD version may have to use a different card number, but just walk over to the telescope if you end up elsewhere :P)

Happy New Year! :)