You are standing in a open field, west of a white house...

[NLS]

You people rule.

[Anotherguest]

I thought it was a tad better now, compared when the engine was introduced into SVN. Reallly cool to see the progress.

[Red_Breast]

Doing a bit of research into the games I came across Rodney Greenblatt's official site and thought the artwork reminded me of something straight away.
It was only when I went further and found out he done artwork for the Playstation games Parapper and Umjammer that I made the connection. My sister has the games.
I do like the art. I ended up making some wallpapers from the downloadable high-res .jpgs.
The site link:
http://www.whimsyload.com/

[Vinterstum]

All you need to have is a copy of one of the aforementioned Activision games, and a new daily build of ScummVM.

...and Mac OS X subversions build that are available a little more frequently than once every century.

New ones up now.

Any mac user: Feel free to PM me if you'd like updated SVN builds, at any time. It's not a completely automated process, which is why they got updated frequently in the old days, but less frequently now .

If someone else wants to make snapshots, please take a look at the wiki for cross compilation instructions (making an universal binary that supports 10.2.9 and up is a bit tricky).

[SuperDre]

You know, that's a good point. When I play Zork I want it to look like it's 1981...

The look would depend a lot on which operating system you ran the game on. For instance, the Macintosh versions of the early games could use a proportional font, instead of a mono-spaced one. There was an opcode to switch to a mono-spaced font for text that needed it. Suspended used this for monitor readouts, for instance. (Later versions of the Z-machine allowed for fancier screen effects. Maybe that's why the ability to switch font was dropped, at least from the Mac version of those games.)

If I read the Infocom Fact Sheet correctly, in 1981 it would have been released on the PDP-11, the TRS-80 and the Apple II. This is supposedly how it looked on the Apple II, and I can't say I care much for that look myself. (I wouldn't want a faithful reproduction of the C64 version either. Playing Infocom games on a C64 was slow.)

If you mean how it looked in DOS, I suppose running DOSBox in fullscreen mode would be a pretty faithful reproduction. Personally though, I'd prefer something that's easier on the eyes.

Well, ScummVM does already have a decent Font handling, so it wouldn't be that hard (ofcourse if someone is willing to do the work) to actually get a version running and where you in the end can select what 'system' it should look like. Getting the interpreter running in ScummVM is the most important thing, then spend time getting the 'visuals' better is the next thing but that's just fonthandling and giving users options for the systemlook, hell you can even go so far to actually implement Themes per game.. Personally I think it would be cool, but more from the point of having one engine to rule them all instead of the actual games themselves.. hehe..

[eriktorbjorn]

Well, ScummVM does already have a decent Font handling, so it wouldn't be that hard (ofcourse if someone is willing to do the work) to actually get a version running and where you in the end can select what 'system' it should look like.

When I said "good font rendering" I was thinking about rendering TrueType fonts, with all that this implies. Something along the lines of the Gargoyle project, I guess, though I haven't really used that one myself yet. And ScummVM does not have any concept of cutting and pasting text, which I think is a pretty nice feature to have for purely text-based games. Not just to cut and paste commands, but - perhaps more importantly - to copy pieces of text from the game into another program (e.g. a text editor) for later reference.

[SuperDre]

When I said "good font rendering" I was thinking about rendering TrueType fonts, with all that this implies. Something along the lines of the Gargoyle project, I guess, though I haven't really used that one myself yet. And ScummVM does not have any concept of cutting and pasting text, which I think is a pretty nice feature to have for purely text-based games. Not just to cut and paste commands, but - perhaps more importantly - to copy pieces of text from the game into another program (e.g. a text editor) for later reference.

But the original textbasedgames also didn't have any copy/paste functions, so for actually playing the games it wouldn't be important.. It's a 'would be nice' feature, which can always be implemented afterwards once the actual games run, which is the most important function of ScummVM anyway, being able to run the original games..

[eriktorbjorn]

But the original textbasedgames also didn't have any copy/paste functions, so for actually playing the games it wouldn't be important..

Again, that depends on which version of the game you played. I'm almost certain that the Macintosh versions of most Infocom games did support copy/paste. (They didn't support anti-aliased text, of course. That would have been pointless on a monochrome screen.)

Anyway, the Z-Machine has been well documented for years, so I suppose that if you want to write an interpreter for it that works with ScummVM, there's nothing to stop you. I don't see much point to it myself, except maybe for the graphical games (the Frotz project has had a graphical version on its TODO list for years), though.

[MusicallyInspired]

Which game data files are needed for Return to Zork CD to work?

EDIT: I've got the game working now but I'd still like to know which data files are needed so I can delete unnecessary ones. Also, why does it play the alternate Adlib tracks for places where it should play the CD tracks primarily in-game like it does in DOS?

[marzipan]

I wonder if it's possible to implement a hack to skip any dialogue bits and cut-scenes? It gets pretty tedious having to listen to everyone rabbit on and on when you've already played the game many times.

[md5]

You can skip in-game videos with the esc key, and you can interrupt dialogs with the left mouse button, or stop them with the "leave" option. Other than that, the dialogs that you have to sit and watch are pretty few...

[Nikioko]

Hah! Cool.

What's next - Infocom games?

I prefer Magnetic Scrolls...

[marzipan]

You can skip in-game videos with the esc key, and you can interrupt dialogs with the left mouse button, or stop them with the "leave" option. Other than that, the dialogs that you have to sit and watch are pretty few...

Pretty few? I'd say there's TONS of dialogue the game won't let you skip through naturally (not to mention that if you have to threaten someone or be friendly to them in order to get a critical item, you have to let their whole speech play all the way through to the end - attempting to end it quickly with Leave Conversation will not progress the game forward). I've pretty much played the game to death, testing both floppy and CD versions through ScummVM and DOSBox, and I could almost recite all the lines off by heart. =P


BTW, is it okay if I cast a vote for either of the following to happen soon....

a) The item spawner debug function to work in this game, or
b) A hack that stops a certain item in the game from being inescapable from a certain location?

Basically, for those who've played the game far enough, they'll come across the penultimate obstacle in the game where you're supposed to chuck your whole inventory at this bridge so you can have it lower, then re-raise on the other side of the screen (yeah, I don't get it either) so that you can see Morpheus. This was made less annoying in the initial version (v1.0) of the game because you could sneak the scroll out of Canuk's house by feeding it to Canuk (when he's a duck again) then taking the egg that's produced (the egg hiding the scroll inside), making it one more inventory item you can use. However, in the two later patched versions of the game (v1.1 and v1.2), the egg can no longer be taken out of his house - it'll disappear magically as if you were carrying the scroll on its own.

Having played this penultimate puzzle many times, you have no idea how mega FRUSTRATING it is to beat it. The concept is simple, but it literally takes EVERYTHING you can lay your hands on throughout all the areas in the game. An additional problem is that while certain items are collectable over and over again should you use them (the meat, the carrots, the hay, the Zorkmids, the bonding plant et al), the game will NOT let you take anymore of them after you've chucked them at the bridge. Meaning a good 90% of the time I find myself with an unwinnable game (and so close to the end as well) all because I end up being one or two items short!!! *headdesks*

[Longcat]

You can cast a vote inside your head, but basically, the right approach would be to do the coding yourself:P

This is an open source project, you have no idea how MEGA FRUSTRATING it is to have people complain about features that are not added in yet that didn't even exist in the original game.

[marzipan]

I kinda feared it wouldn't be easy, to be honest.


I guess I'll just have to wait and see if somebody reports on here as having beaten the game with a later version, and perhaps explain how they managed to get around the inventory problem. Because until then I really don't want to touch the bloody game again for quite a while.