Lands of Lore: The Throne of Chaos on iPhone et al.

music235 · Post by **music235** » Mon Dec 03, 2007 8:50 pm

Just wondering if it is possible to port this game. If you have played it, you know why I am requesting it. I still think that it is one of the best games ever made. From the voice of Patrick Stuart to the richness of detail, plot and design, it is just superb, and highly addictive. The musical score is also great.

It ran on MS-DOS originally, and plays fine on DOSbox. It is a point-and-click game, which is why I thought it woud be perfect for ScummVM and the iPhone! The game is small (about 12mb I think), unless you add all of the voices, which makes it a lot bigger.

Here is a link to some more info about Lands of Lore: The Throne of Chaos:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lands_of_L ... e_of_Chaos

Thanks for any interest in this!

Vinterstum · Post by **Vinterstum** » Mon Dec 03, 2007 8:57 pm

Game requests belong here

(moved to the Junkyard forum)

While Lands of Lord indeed is a great game, it's an RPG and not an adventure game, so it's out of ScummVM's scope I'm afraid.

music235 · Post by **music235** » Mon Dec 03, 2007 9:00 pm

But this is a point-and-click adventure game, which is what ScummVM was designed for. Have you played it?

Also: your iPhone port of ScummVM is great! I was wondering if there would be any kind of game interface like this, and here it is! I am glad to donate!

clem · Post by **clem** » Mon Dec 03, 2007 9:42 pm

music235 wrote:But this is a point-and-click adventure game, which is what ScummVM was designed for. Have you played it?

Also: your iPhone port of ScummVM is great! I was wondering if there would be any kind of game interface like this, and here it is! I am glad to donate!

if that is a point-and-click adventure game, what is an RPG?

Let's also add Far Cry! I point and click myself through the game, and it is an adventure!

music235 · Post by **music235** » Mon Dec 03, 2007 9:49 pm

You are not helping, clem.

My point was that this is a game designed specifically for control with just a mouse and a single button, no keyboard or secondary buttons needed. And it was intended to be more on the adventure side than an RPG. So I thought that it would work. It is a 3d game, yes, but that doesn't mean it's not an adventure game.

Raziel · Post by **Raziel** » Mon Dec 03, 2007 10:00 pm

music235 wrote: You are not helping, clem.

I don't think he was trying to

My point was that this is a game designed specifically for control with just a mouse and a single button, no keyboard or secondary buttons needed. And it was intended to be more on the adventure side than an RPG. So I thought that it would work. It is somewhat of a 3d game, yes, but that doesn't mean it's an adventure game.

WIKI entry
Moby Games entry
Just Adventure entry

Looks like you are the only one thinking of it as an adventure game

edit: btw, i'm not trying to discourage you, grab your coding book and start writing an engine,
if you got a working one, why not come back so the devs may reconsider adding it?

And even if not, you still have an open source reimplementation of Lands of Lore for thousands
of platforms to port on your hands, sounds good, doesn't it?

music235 · Post by **music235** » Mon Dec 03, 2007 10:08 pm

I appreciate the advice. The only coding I know is .html and .php, unfortunately.

Okay - so this game is classified under RPG's, officially. But - if it would work well under ScummVM, why not do it? I mean, rules are made to be broken! Why not use ScummVm for any game that would work well? Or is the problem related more to actual implementation rather than adhering strictly to the definition of what is allowed and what isn't?

Kaminari · Post by **Kaminari** » Mon Dec 03, 2007 10:11 pm

Lands of Lore works great in DOSBox.

music235 wrote:I mean, rules are made to be broken!

Yeah... I'm a part-time spoonbender.

music235 · Post by **music235** » Mon Dec 03, 2007 10:12 pm

Yes, I've played it that way. This post was specifically to get it working on the iPhone. So far, it doesn't look like DOSBox is being developed for the iPhone platform.

DrMcCoy · Post by **DrMcCoy** » Mon Dec 03, 2007 10:34 pm

music235 wrote:But - if it would work well under ScummVM, why not do it? I mean, rules are made to be broken! Why not use ScummVm for any game that would work well?

You fail to grasp how ScummVM works. ScummVM is no complete PC emulation, it's a collection of reimplementation of specific game engines.

Every game (-engine) that should work with ScummVM has to be painstankingly analyzed, taken apart and basically reprogrammed. It's long, hard and tedious work that can take a long time.
It's not a matter of just springling around some magical dust (or changing just a few lines of code) and *POOF*, the game works. We're talking about adding tens of thousand of code lines.

Raziel · Post by **Raziel** » Mon Dec 03, 2007 10:34 pm

music235 wrote: why not do it?

Three things missing:

1) Time to work on it
b) Devs to work on it
III) Time to work on it
1.4.) No source code

Oh well, that was more than three, but you get the idea, yes?

DennisBergkamp · Post by **DennisBergkamp** » Mon Dec 03, 2007 11:32 pm

I agree with Music, Lands of Lore would run beautifully on an iPhone.
But yes, the question is, who will add it into ScummVM? I'm not, that's for sure. Until there's anyone that has the free time, has the coding capabilities and is willing to invest hundreds of unpaid hours on porting this thing, it won't happen.

And Music, unfortunately Westwood hasn't released any source code for Lands of Lore, so chances are very slim a ScummVM port will ever happen.

Sad but true

music235 · Post by **music235** » Mon Dec 03, 2007 11:52 pm

Okay, thanks for your input, everyone. I understand the situation now - although I already understood that scummVM is a per-game implementation, rather than an emulator for an entire OS.

For now, I will content myself with exploring the wonderful world of existing scummVM games on the iPhone.

fingolfin · Post by **fingolfin** » Tue Dec 04, 2007 9:21 am

Offtopic, but: in theory, DOSBox should work on the iPhone just fine, assuming the SDL port is well developed enough. (Better would be if somebody wrote a dedicated iPhone backend for it, I guess). Only ... slow. This would probably be a bit (a lot?) better if "somebody" (again, this mysterious unknown person

developed an ARM core for its dynamic recompilation CPU core. There used to be a guy working on that, but it seems he abandoned that effort. Sadly, Robin_Watts, our local ARM wiz(z)ard is not inclined at the time to look at it either (which I can perfectly understand, BTW, it'd eat lots of time).
But maybe some other folks who know about ARM coding *and* possess an iPhone would be interested in this. If so, I have some docs on how to create a potential DOSBox ARM core, and am working myself on a PowerPC core for it.

cappuchok · Post by **cappuchok** » Thu Dec 06, 2007 7:49 am

Just to elaborate a little on Lands of Lore, I'd like to note to anyone interested in creating an engine for it (not within the scope of ScummVM) that looking at the ScummVM implementation of the Kyrandia engine may provide some useful code. According to Mike Legg, one of the original programmers from the Westwood team, Lore, Kyrandia and Dune II were made at around the same time and share many technologies (presumably graphics/sound formats and maybe more).
But as Lore is an RPG and Dune II is an RTS, neither of them fit within the scope of ScummVM; but that doesn't mean existing ScummVM code can't be used to aid in porting it.