Alien Incident

jacuzi · Post by **jacuzi** » Fri Apr 17, 2009 7:34 pm

Hi.

I was wandering has many people heard or played this awesome point&click adventure game? The graphics and dialog is old lucasarts style.

I hope it will be playable via scummvm someday. I own it and it is hard to get it work with dosbox.

Check out a review and the awesome intro!

http://www2.worldvillage.com/wv/gamezon ... /alien.htm

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ep_YUd5W ... re=related

raina · Post by **raina** » Sat Apr 18, 2009 3:58 am

It's much easier to get it to work on DOSBox than adding support for it in ScummVM. Don't get me wrong, I would love to see it happen, but the first sentence is still true.

What exactly is the problem when dealing with DOSBox here? I remember spending a little time setting it up but honestly, most of the time went into making an icon, a launcher script/shortcut and trying on different graphics scalers for the game.

I really didn't play the game much this time but it seemed to work alright. The only thing I know that makes a difference is that there's something wrong with the game's Ultrasound support and you get better results with SoundBlaster. It's a shame but it was like that on actual hardware as well.

bobdevis · Post by **bobdevis** » Sat Apr 18, 2009 4:14 am

raina wrote:It's much easier to get it to work on DOSBox than adding support for it in ScummVM.

Hey, that true for every single DOS game out there.
All of them that don't have some hardware exploit copy protection anyway. I have a Lemmings1 floppy somewhere (probably demagnetized now) where the copy protection was a bad sector.

SuperDre · Post by **SuperDre** » Sun Apr 19, 2009 6:21 pm

Well, this isn't a game that is hard to come by I guess, just checked amazon.co.uk and it is still available from 3 sellers as new sealed games with the highest being 7.50 pound (excluding the 3.16 pound postage in the UK)..

Just checked a version from an abandonware site, couldn't get it started via dosbox (was complaining about no CDROM drive, and I'm too lazy to figure out how to 'mount' a drive as being a cdrom drive) but checking the GAME.EXE it seems there is no real logic in there so that's positive.. but then again, I was just looking at 'text' so I could be wrong..
Seems like a fun adventure to me looking at the description/screenshots of the game..

Post by **eriktorbjorn** » Sun Apr 19, 2009 7:03 pm

SuperDre wrote:Well, this isn't a game that is hard to come by I guess, just checked amazon.co.uk and it is still available from 3 sellers as new sealed games with the highest being 7.50 pound (excluding the 3.16 pound postage in the UK)..

That image of a hand holding a CD that they're using seems to be the hallmark of Butterfly Media though, which has a bad reputation.

Reckless · Post by **Reckless** » Sun Apr 19, 2009 10:32 pm

Yes, I would definitely think that anything so readily available will be nothing more than pirate games burnt on to CD-R's [having been burnt myself when purchasing a copy of Touche from eBay]. If anyone proceeds, it's buyer beware of course!

The game is quite hard to find though genuine items have popped up on eBay.

john_doe · Post by **john_doe** » Mon Apr 20, 2009 6:56 am

About 2-3 years ago I contacted Housemarque about the source code. They have it, they would be willing to give it to ScummVM devs but they'd have to look for the code on their backup media which of course would need someone of their staff to do. Sadly they were not willing to do that (which is understandable).
The game itself is written in Borland Pascal 6 plus x86 assembly for the low-level stuff. Even worse, all the game logic is hardcoded

raina · Post by **raina** » Mon Apr 20, 2009 10:04 am

I was going to suggest contacting Housemarque, glad you had already done so. Bit of a pity about the response though. I wonder if they would consider resurrecting the game's sales through say GOG.COM profitable enough to allocate some resources into getting the code.

SuperDre · Post by **SuperDre** » Mon Apr 20, 2009 11:52 am

eriktorbjorn wrote:That image of a hand holding a CD that they're using seems to be the hallmark of Butterfly Media though, which has a bad reputation.

Amazon isn't ebay....

raina wrote:I was going to suggest contacting Housemarque, glad you had already done so. Bit of a pity about the response though. I wonder if they would consider resurrecting the game's sales through say GOG.COM profitable enough to allocate some resources into getting the code.

Try contacting them again, Scummvm has a better reputation now as it did 2-3 years ago.. and GOG wasn't even available back then... BUT as John_Doe says it's logic is hardcoded, and that makes it a bit more time consuming, but ofcourse with full sourcecode available it's propably even simpler, as no reverse-engineering is needed (which would take much MUCH longer).. I think most 'games' which are stalled in Scummvm because of hardcoded logic have to be RE as none of the code is provided (but I could be wrong, and if so please tell me which ones have full sources available)..

Longcat · Post by **Longcat** » Mon Apr 20, 2009 11:56 am

SuperDre wrote:
eriktorbjorn wrote:That image of a hand holding a CD that they're using seems to be the hallmark of Butterfly Media though, which has a bad reputation.
Amazon isn't ebay....

It's just as open a market place as ebay:)

Post by **eriktorbjorn** » Mon Apr 20, 2009 12:03 pm

SuperDre wrote: Amazon isn't ebay....

Yes, sorry, I misread that. One reason I got them confused is that both eBay and Amazon have a seller named "dvdjoneslocker" who is selling the game.

SuperDre · Post by **SuperDre** » Tue Apr 21, 2009 1:24 pm

eriktorbjorn wrote:
SuperDre wrote: Amazon isn't ebay....
Yes, sorry, I misread that. One reason I got them confused is that both eBay and Amazon have a seller named "dvdjoneslocker" who is selling the game.

I guess it's the same seller.. and looking at ebay it's definitly the butterfly version..
So there's no way you can get the original version anywhere anymore, as I guess this version is the same that's on the abandoneware sites because the description(short review) on ebay is exactly the same... So it's definitly a good suggestion to contact the original author again, and hoping they changed their stance on providing the sources (and hopefully even put it on GOG or better yet as freeware on Scummvm (you can dream.. hehe))..

pncFreak · Post by **pncFreak** » Thu Apr 23, 2009 12:28 pm

raina wrote: What exactly is the problem when dealing with DOSBox here?

DOSBox does not work on mobile phones. That is why I would prefer support for games in scummVM.

Freddo · Post by **Freddo** » Thu Apr 23, 2009 8:21 pm

pncFreak wrote:DOSBox does not work on mobile phones. That is why I would prefer support for games in scummVM.

DOSBox was ported to Symbian phones earlier this year.

Granted, the phones today aren't fast enough to emulate a DOS game from 1995 properly so it will probably be a bit stuttery.

bobdevis · Post by **bobdevis** » Thu Apr 23, 2009 9:37 pm

Freddo wrote: DOSBox was ported to Symbian phones earlier this year.
Granted, the phones today aren't fast enough to emulate a DOS game from 1995 properly so it will probably be a bit stuttery.

Oh yeah;
Some adventurous people even used an experimental DosBox compile to run Windows9x on a Symbian phone.
The problem is the speed, obviously