Murder in a Wheel / Mord im Laufrad can't play with German subtitles

[Mustrum]

The AGS game Murder in a Wheel (original: Mord im Laufrad) is by default in German and for the English subtitles an English.tra was added.
When I add Murder in a Wheel in ScummVM, the game is always with English subtitles. There is no language selection in German in ScummVM.

As a user, there are currently two options for playing the game with German subtitles:
1st option: Add Murder in a Wheel and select English as the game language. Then edit in the scummvm.ini in the section [murderinawheel] the entry translation=English to German.

Code: Select all

[murderinawheel]
translation=German

2nd option: Before adding the game, delete or rename the file English.tra (*.bak).

The best option would be for ScummVM to recognize the identifier [1] of MordImLaufrad.exe as German by default and the second identifier English.tra as English.
[1] https://github.com/scummvm/scummvm/blob ... es.h#L7912
The checksums of MordImLaufrad.exe and English.tra:

Code: Select all

MordImLaufrad.exe: 18b284c22010850f79bc5c20054a70c4 (first 5000 bytes), 4396809 bytes
English.tra: d2a986a63248932ded2a032b4695a6e4 (first 5000 bytes), 100861 bytes

I hope that in the future the game will be playable in German without complications in ScummVM.

Website of the game Murder in a Wheel: https://hulub.ch/murderinawheel.php?lang=en
Download:
https://games.softpedia.com/get/Freewar ... heel.shtml
https://www.adventuregamestudio.co.uk/s ... n-a-wheel/
https://maniac-mansion-mania.com/index. ... ufrad.html

[tag2015]

Hi, there's an easier fix. Open the acsetup.cfg file and delete the translation=English line. Then the language option in the ScummVM GUI will work properly ("default" will use German texts, "English" will load the english translation). You can also use winsetup.exe if you can run it.

Basically che reason is that the AGS configuration file will always override the ScummVM settings. You can find more info here https://bugs.scummvm.org/ticket/13659

[Mustrum]

Thanks for the answer tag2015, I didn't know that ScummVM gets the information from acsetup.cfg file.
That would be a 3rd option, but still not the best solution to select the language English or German via ScummVM.

I compiled ScummVM with the following entries:

Code: Select all

// GAME_ENTRY("murderinawheel", "MordImLaufrad.exe", "18b284c22010850f79bc5c20054a70c4", 4396809),  // En-De
GAME_ENTRY_EN("murderinawheel", "English.tra", "d2a986a63248932ded2a032b4695a6e4", 100861),  // En
GAME_ENTRY_LANG("murderinawheel", "MordImLaufrad.exe", "18b284c22010850f79bc5c20054a70c4", 4396809, Common::DE_DEU),  // De

Language selection English / German

murderinawheel1.png (13.05 KiB) Viewed 2459 times

German selected, language only English

murderinawheel2.png (10.06 KiB) Viewed 2459 times

I was able to select German, but the game itself still had English subtitles, is there a solution without modifying the game files?

[tag2015]

Sorry but I don't really understand what you are trying to achieve, you don't need to rebuild scummvm for this to work. The acsetup.cfg file is not really part of the game files, it's merely a text file that is generated by winsetup with the various settings (graphics, audio and the chosen translation file). You can also delete it completely and the game will run just fine (with default settings). Is the problem that your gamedir is readonly and you can't change the files there? Or you want to add two separate entries one for german and one for english?

[Mustrum]

Or you want to add two separate entries one for german and one for english?

Yes, but without changing the acsetup.cfg (or deleting the English.tra) and that the selected German version has German subtitles.
The game offers subtitles in two languages: default = German and alternative = English
A normal user doesn't know that the acsetup.cfg has to be changed to be able to play the game with German subtitles.
The best way is to select the language when adding in ScummVM, like in the screenshot above.
Or as criezy has written:

Finally we could also forget the attempt to use by default the language from acsetup.cfg, and always ignore it. In that case we would just have to change the meaning of <default> to mean "do not use any translation file".

[GBuster]

I'd second the idea to not parse the config file at all but rather rely on what is setup in ScummVM.
The issue with that specific game is that it ships with "english" prefilled in the config file, even though the game is german natively.