This is the ultimate Broken Sword 2 guide, showing you what files you need, where to put them, and how to compress the installation to save space.
The documentation doesn't explain how to lay out the directory structure when preparing Broken Sword 2 for ScummVM. It's also very vague about which files and directories you need, since it says that you have to copy all *.inf files, which is wrong and would give you useless files such as autorun.inf.
This has lead to some confusion and a fair amount of threads asking about all sorts of problems with figuring out how to lay out the Broken Sword 2 files. Therefore I've read through the ScummVM forums, documentation and double-checked in the source code and am going to explain exactly which files you need and where to put them. I wish someone had done that for me, which is why I am sharing this. That, and I really have nothing better to do.
This is how your final directory structure should look (under a folder called "sword2"):
Code: Select all
\clusters [directory]
\sword2 [directory]
\video [directory]
\clusters\carib1.clu
\clusters\carib2.clu
\clusters\carib3.clu
\clusters\cluster.tab
\clusters\credits.bmp
\clusters\credits.clu
\clusters\docks.clu
\clusters\font.clu
\clusters\general.clu
\clusters\jungle.clu
\clusters\music1.clu
\clusters\music2.clu
\clusters\paris.clu
\clusters\players.clu
\clusters\pyramid1.clu
\clusters\pyramid2.clu
\clusters\quaramon.clu
\clusters\resource.inf
\clusters\resource.tab
\clusters\scripts.clu
\clusters\speech1.clu
\clusters\speech2.clu
\clusters\text.clu
\clusters\warehous.clu
\sword2\cd.inf
\sword2\startup.inf
\video\carib.dxa
\video\carib.fla
\video\escape.dxa
\video\escape.fla
\video\eye.dxa
\video\eye.fla
\video\finale.dxa
\video\finale.fla
\video\guard.dxa
\video\guard.fla
\video\intro.dxa
\video\intro.fla
\video\jungle.dxa
\video\jungle.fla
\video\museum.dxa
\video\museum.fla
\video\pablo.dxa
\video\pablo.fla
\video\pyramid.dxa
\video\pyramid.fla
\video\quaram.dxa
\video\quaram.fla
\video\river.dxa
\video\river.fla
\video\sailing.dxa
\video\sailing.fla
\video\shaman.dxa
\video\shaman.fla
\video\stone1.dxa
\video\stone2.dxa
\video\stone2.fla
\video\stone3.dxa
\video\stone3.fla
This guide applies to both the ORIGINAL 1997 CDs, and the "Sold Out Software" release. The files are identical on both, but with the Sold Out version you have to install the game to your harddrive and copy the data files from the installation folder (because they are packaged into .cab files on the CD), while the original 1997 CDs have all the files right on the CD and you can copy them straight off there without installing the game.
Now for detailed descriptions:
\clusters:
The files under the \clusters directory come from the \clusters directories on your two Broken Sword II CDs. However, the music and speech files from both CDs have conflicting names, so rename speech.clu and music.clu to speechX.clu and musicX.clu, where X is the CD that particular file came from; as an example, speech.clu from CD1 would be renamed to speech1.clu. There are four other cluster files with conflicting names that exist on both CDs, but these remaining files are all completely identical so you can use the ones from either CD.
\sword2:
The \sword2 directory is found on CD1, and you should ONLY copy the cd.inf and startup.inf files from there. The ScummVM readme says that startup.inf is optional, but that's only semi-true since it is actually used for the debug menu and therefore you should keep it. The readme really shouldn't be calling it optional since there is a use for it.
\video:
The files in this directory come from the Broken Sword II Cutscene Pack (Sword2_DXA_Cutscenes.zip).
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Edit by md5: This is relevant for older versions of ScummVM only. ScummVM is now able to decode the original Smacker videos of the game (smk file extension), so you can just copy them off the game's CD. It cannot decode the MPEG2 videos of some releases, so you'll only need the DXA cutscene pack for these versions.
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You have to download the cutscenes instead of using the ones on the CDs, because ScummVM cannot decode the original cutscene videos due to licensing issues with the Smacker Video format. This cutscene pack contains re-encoded cutscenes in the lossless DXA format. Simply extract this 111MB zip file into the \video folder and you're done, unless you are going to be playing on a slow device. In that case, delete all the *.fla files (they contain FLAC audio which is CPU intensive), and download the OGG Vorbis Audio replacement (Sword2_OGG_Cutscenes.zip) and extract it into the \video folder. This gives you OGG Vorbis audio files instead, which takes up much less processing power for a pretty much indistinguishable quality loss (the original audio files were lo-fi to begin with, we're not dealing with audiophile stuff here ). Also note that the OGG files are about 10MB smaller than the FLAC files, so even if your device has the CPU power to play FLAC audio, you may still want the OGG audio files if you are tight on space.
You're done!
This is all there is to it, you can start playing now, or you can read on to find out how to also compress the game files. Make sure that you place the above directory structure under a folder called "sword2" and point ScummVM to it. It doesn't strictly have to be called "sword2" anymore since ScummVM now detects games based on file checksums instead of folder name, but it doesn't hurt to comply with the official naming standard.
Interestingly enough, the subfolders (meaning \video, \clusters and \sword2) don't actually have to be laid out in this way. You could put all files in a single folder if you wanted to since ScummVM searches for the necessary files in all subfolders. However, the above layout is the official layout so I suggest you use it for that reason alone.
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BONUS Section: What about Compression?
The directory structure above takes up exactly 1 gigabyte. By compressing the speech and music you can almost halve that number. That's a very interesting proposition for those playing on limited-storage devices.
We'll be compressing the audio into the OGG Vorbis format. With slight changes to this guide you could encode the audio as MP3 instead; however, I highly recommend against using MP3 simply because OGG is a superior compression algorithm and sounds much better while producing smaller files. It is rare but possible that ScummVM for your intended device (if it is a low-powered one) doesn't support OGG Vorbis. In that case, you'll have to look up an MP3 conversion guide as that's beyond the scope of this tutorial.
Before we go on, make sure that you have about 2 gigabytes free space on the drive where you'll be doing the conversion.
Let's begin! Simply download the ScummVM Tools (scummvm-tools-0.11.0-win32.zip) and extract the file called compress_sword2.exe to a temporary working directory (can be anything, such as c:\scummtools). Next, download the Lancer version of OggEnc (this is a highly optimized version of OggEnc which supports multiple cores) from http://homepage3.nifty.com/blacksword/. The page is partly in Japanese, but simply scroll down to the heading that says "oggenc2.83" and pick the file that corresponds to your CPU capabilities (you can choose between sse/sse2/sse3 versions, or the highly recommended multithreaded "mt" versions of the sse2/sse3 versions). When you've picked the version you want, open the archive and extract the file called oggenc2.exe to your temporary working directory, then rename it to oggenc.exe (this is important!).
Now go into your \clusters folder and move the speech1.clu, speech2.clu, music1.clu, and music2.clu files to your temporary working directory. We could have done the conversion right in the \clusters folder, but since the compression process creates a lot of temporary files it would have been very messy, that's why we are doing it in a temporary folder.
Now it's time to make a .bat file so that you can run it and automatically compress all files without having to type the commands manually. Copy the following into a bat file called compress.bat and save it to the temporary working directory:
Code: Select all
@echo off
echo.
echo This batch file will compress the Broken Sword 2 audio files to save space.
echo.
echo Quality settings:
echo * Using OGG Vorbis (aoTuV b5 Lancer) at quality level 3 (64kbps)...
echo.
echo Press any key to begin compression...
pause >nul
compress_sword2.exe --vorbis -q 3 speech1.clu
compress_sword2.exe --vorbis -q 3 speech2.clu
compress_sword2.exe --vorbis -q 3 music1.clu
compress_sword2.exe --vorbis -q 3 music2.clu
echo Process complete! Please verify that all four files were successfully created.
pause >nul
Run the compress.bat file and step away from the computer; this will take a while depending on your CPU, and whether or not you use the multithreaded version of OggEnc! It took me about 16 minutes on an Intel Quad Core @ 2.4 GHz, and that's when using the highly optimized multithreaded version. Depending on your CPU this could take up to an hour.
Once the batch file has finished running you should end up with four new files in your temporary working directory: speech1.clg, speech2.clg, music1.clg, and music2.clg. If everything was successful and you have these four files then simply delete the original files since they are no longer necessary: speech1.clu, speech2.clu, music1.clu, and music2.clu. Move the four new *.clg files back to your \clusters folder and you're done!
Note that the compress_sword2 tool will only work with the four speech and music files, and will not work with any of the other *.clu files or any files from Broken Sword 1 (instead use compress_sword1 for that).
The uncompressed audio files take up 650mb, while the new OGG compressed files take up 191mb, that's 29% of what the size used to be!
These are the final setup sizes:
BS2 with uncompressed audio: 1.00 GB (1,084,674,379 bytes)
BS2 with ogg audio: 575 MB (603,926,318 bytes)
Have fun with a great piece of classic Adventure Gaming!