6680 success + thoughts (zip support, legibility, volume)

[jg]

WOW! I can play Beneath a Steel Sky on my mobile phone! Et cetera! Yes, it works excellently on my Nokia 6680. Kudos to everyone involved, you're all fricking geniuses and I am forever intertwined in a complex love/hate relationship with you all.

Now to the thoughts.

1) ZIP support would be very useful right about now. Now that you've ported ScummVM to several handhelds, I suspect every byte counts. Just saying that there's a morally defendable reason now.

2) On LucasArts games, the text is quite legible. However, the narrower font in BASS is completely bunged by the resizing. Coupled with Revolution's predisposition towards writing key words in ALL CAPS, this gets quite frustrating.


the bigger pic

I did find the true resolution mode on the "clear" button, and scrolling on a couple of number keys, but that often leaves only half of the dialog visible. Is there any way to make the fonts more legible in the resized landscape mode?

3) EScummVM seems to ignore the volume settings. This leaves the volume extremely loud. I truly didn't know my phone could make noises this loud. My ears are still ringing from opening the SCUMM bar door. </hyberbole>

BUT these are all rather minor points. Getting these games running on my phone is so awesome I shouldn't even be writing this post. I should be playing! Why am I not playing SCUMM games on my phone right now?!

[jg]

OK, I did some more testing. It seems like portrait mode is the way to go if I want to be able to read anything. To not go crazy from the loud music and sfx, I attached my handsfree set and used it as a loudspeaker.

Here are the keys that I've been able to suss out:

Joystick: Move cursor
Fire: Right click (auto actions on actors and items like "Talk to prisoner" or "Open door")
Left menu button: Left click (for choosing actions and items manually)
1: Scroll horizontally (holding the phone normally, in portrait orientation)
2: Scroll vertically
3: Flip screen up-side down (in landscape mode)
*: Save/load menu (F5)
0: Toggle mouse cursor position between scene, action words and inventory
#: Skip/ESC
C: Change screen mode between portrait (scaled vertically, scroll with 1), landscape fillscreen (no scroll, flip with 3) and landscape actual size (scroll with 1 & 2, flip with 3).
Pen/ABC: Toggle writing mode, for entering save game titles; cycles through alphabetic mode (press numeral several times to cycle through letters, left menu button to type), numeric mode and "off" mode

There's also a shortcut system for selecting dialog options that would be useful if it didn't conflict with the scroll/flip buttons. When playing in portrait mode, I found myself pressing 1 a lot to flip between the replies and the dialog options. However, this also automatically selects the first dialog option. Very confusing. On the other hand, I have to say that it is indeed a very useful feature in the landscape fillscreen mode. My suggestion is to remove this feature from the scrolling screen modes.

The 0-button toggle is brilliant! It actually remembers three positions for the mouse cursor, so if you move it over "Pick up" and then toggle to the scene and back again, it's back over "Pick up". Absolutely perfect for the plank/bird/fish puzzle in MI1.

Still haven't encountered any gameplay problems, just GUI and sound. To clarify, sound works perfectly, it's just that it ignores volume settings, so it's very loud.

[jg]

Now I know what's going on with the dialog selection + screen scroll conflict. What's happening is that every numeric keypress is caught twice by EScummVM. The GUI catches it and uses it for scrolling, and the VM catches it and uses it in the running game.

This may have been obvious to developers all along, but it became painfully obvious when I was playing Day of the Tentacle (on my phone! did I mention I love you guys?). In DOTT on the PC, you can switch between the characters with the keys 1-3. Unfortunately, these are the exact same keys I'm pressing repeatedly in EScummVM to scroll around. Every time I want to see another part of the screen, another character is chosen! This makes DOTT barely playable on the S60.

[Anotherguest]

How the keymapping should work!
There are some basic keymapping scummvm needs to work, and then you also need to be able to control the way it looks (to read text, to watch an intro, to enter text, read dialogs etc). And due to the nature of the limted keyboard support and screen resolution this is really hard to do.

perhaps a menusystem to control SDL perhaps!? Which commands/controls needs to be dynamic and which can be more static?

[jg]

Hmm... There is a key remapping feature in EScummVM already. Start a game, go to the menu (*), and choose Options. There's a "Keys" button there that doesn't exist in ScummVM on the PC. Interestingly, the key mapping menu shows "Zone" as being mapped to 0, "Save" to * and "Skip" to #. The rest of the actions, such as "left", "right", "up", "down" and "left click"/"right click" are mapped to "none", so this mapping system seems to be only partly in use.

But it seems kind of useless in its current state, because it's separated from the actual phone key input. For example, if I press "Map" and try to map the fire button or a menu select button to an action, nothing happens. It ignores that input, and seemingly only reacts to 0-9, * and #, i.e. keys that have already been translated elsewhere in the code to actual characters.

In addition, it's not yet integrated with the GUI system. There are no mappable actions for scrolling and flipping.

If you can fix the mapping system that is already in place (which is perhaps easier said than done), everything would be fine. Then I could map the right menu key to scrolling in portrait mode, and that wouldn't interfere with any existing actions in any PC games.

On an unrelated note, I have discovered that BASS crashes when run the second time. It looks like EScummVM wants to use the wrong colour depth, since the Virgin logo appears double and green. (Very similar to when running some 6630 apps on the 6680.) A rather painless workaround is to remove the game from the ScummVM menu and add it again. It seems like something in the INI-file doesn't agree with EScummVM the second time this game is run. I'll compare the INI-file before and after running the game and report any differences.

(I have to do the same for other games as well, because I noticed something very similar with Gobliiins EGA on the PC ScummVM, but this is not the right thread for it, and I haven't checked whether it's a related issue.)

[Anotherguest]

The Key configuration is something that has been moved from the CE port to the generic port, and is should be available to all PDA ports now. The only big difference is what kind of events we support to remap.

So there is one portion which maps to ScummVM as such and one portion which is mapped to SDL and how that is implemented (screenmodes, inputmodes etc). Actually, if you want to use the remaps more, then you should run in cursor mode, not in joystick mode. Switching from Joystick (mouse emulation) to cursor mode (keyboard mode), will map up, down, left and right to those keyevents, also soft key left and soft key right will be mapped to F1 and F2 respectivly.

What is lacking in the keys section, is the support for more games, for example the character switching in Dott, but the keys are pretty game specific, and that means that we can have one setting per game or one global setting for generic events (such as next character).. But this is work in progress...

[jg]

Just as a note for future reference, this is how cursor mode looks on my phone:

Left soft key -> Return
Right soft key -> Space
Fire on joystick -> .

[Anotherguest]

Well.. F1 F2 are mapped to Scumm Space (pause) and enter.. I.e standard scumm keys. F1 F2 are the events which SDL sends. So there is one SDL part which maps symbian keys->SDL keys.. and one in ScummVM which maps SDL->ScummVM keys..

So just a matter of improving it.

[Anotherguest]

There is zip support in the save states, but as for zip support in the datafiles I think they usualy are quite compressed already, and you can always compress the sound with mp3.

[jg]

I did compress the SOU-file for Day of the Tentacle, so it's now somewhere around half its original size. However, the other data files are pretty big too. If I zip DOTT, it goes from 13.3 MB to 7.6 MB. That's a pretty big difference, so apparently the data files are not all that compressed already.

Anyway, the ZIP feature is not that big a deal. I'd really like an EScummVM with adjustable volume. Sure, I love Michael Land's music in Monkey Island, but when my phone screams it out at maximum volume, the charm kind of fades.

[Anotherguest]

Strange.. because ScummVM is using internal mixing for the volume, i.e you should be able to turn down the internal master volume which in turn should affect the mixing. The only it does not affect is mp3, which has n't got a setting for audio volume.

And on a 6680, you can quite abit on the way with a big memorycard today, I have a 128mb to my n-gage, which right now holds 3-5 games

[jg]

Well, then there seems to be something wrong with the internal mixer. Here's what vne said about his 7710 (at http://forums.scummvm.org/viewtopic.php?p=362#362):

apparently music volume slider under options doesn't behave as expected - even if set to 0, it still too loud for me

The same goes for me, with the S60 version. So I guess something happened to the sound mixing during the port, because it really is broken.

[theneb]

jg how goes the second time crash problem? It's occuring for me too.
Another problem is that let's say someone calls me or I get a delivery report, the sound in the game will just die.
However cudos to the team for in the first place allowing me to be able to play BASS on my phone.

[jg]

jg how goes the second time crash problem?

Good thing you reminded me. I checked the INI-file and found no changes being made by running the game. So that's not the problem. So then I thought it might be a more obscure problem, and tried some different things. I hope this will help someone (anotherguest?) to track it down.

It doesn't take much to get BASS to crash the second time around. Just start it up, skip the intro so that Foster is standing in the starting screen and then quit. Whether you've loaded/saved your game or played a longer or shorter time doesn't seem to make any difference.

If BASS has started crashing, then turning off and turning on the phone doesn't help. BASS will just crash again. So apparently it's not something being left in memory or any kind of resource not being released properly.

EScummVM doesn't quit when BASS crashes, so technically I guess it's not really a crash. The process is still running in the background after the faulty graphics disappear, and it's impossible to switch to it. Sometimes when I try to kill the process, the phone crashes and reboots. Other times, I can kill EScummVM and rerun it just fine.

I found that you don't actually have to remove and re-add BASS to get around the crash. Just go into Edit Game... -> Paths -> Game Path and select the same path again. This seems to imply that the only thing that needs to happen is either directory listing or writing to the INI file. However, this strikes me as very odd, so I'm guessing something else happens while you're editing the path. Perhaps some sort of initialization?

[jumpjack]

How do I run ScummVM on 6680? It crashes as soon as it starts, and no log files are saved into c:\documets\scummvm

I downloaded s20-2nd version.
I found a thread about a "special 6680 version", but the link is broken.
http://forums.scummvm.org/viewtopic.php ... de860b7aae