Status of SCI games

[marzipan]

I'm really hoping that one of these days we'll see full support for SCI32, since right now running King's Quest VII is simply a pain. It's a shame Sierra was so cheap when they published the Collections.

I'd say it was less a Sierra thing and more of a Vivendi thing, or more accurately Vivendi's quick-let's-cash-in-on-nostalgia-in-as-hurried-a-manner-as-possible brainstorm. Sierra were suggested to have died back in '99 after all.

All the DOS games ran through DOSBox and King's Quest VII was left exactly as it was in the original - No effort was made to make it more compatible [you still have to force the 256 color mode, etc.].

This thread on the Sierra Help forums goes into good detail as to how flawed and lazily put together the Vivendi collections really were.

By the way, is AGI & SGI support implemented solely thanks to reverse engineering? Sierra wouldn't be kind enough to help out here, would they? After all, they could benefit from this, as having engine level support is obviously much better than DOSBox solution.

Don't have a real answer for this, but like I said Sierra don't really 'exist' anymore as such. It's just a bunch of suits masquerading as them, although I believe they've even dropped the name altogether these days.

[Collector]

I'm really hoping that one of these days we'll see full support for SCI32, since right now running King's Quest VII is simply a pain. It's a shame Sierra was so cheap when they published the Collections.

All the DOS games ran through DOSBox and King's Quest VII was left exactly as it was in the original - No effort was made to make it more compatible [you still have to force the 256 color mode, etc.].

Bugs aside, I'm still really impressed that ScummVM has come so far. I never really thought that Sierra games would be supported by the project.

I also tested Freddy Pharkas, but kept getting an annoying error on every click.

By the way, is AGI & SGI support implemented solely thanks to reverse engineering? Sierra wouldn't be kind enough to help out here, would they? After all, they could benefit from this, as having engine level support is obviously much better than DOSBox solution.

My patch will upgrade the KQ7 v1.4 that came with the collection to v2.00b that has a DOS interpreter. The patch also restores the missing install files, includes all of the patches and automatically sets them up in the latest DOSBox. It can be found on my website.

[Morden]

That's one long list of issues, and major ones, too. Thanks to your webpage I finally know why KQ6 is flickering, and I know this is not the place to ask for this, but what driver should I use to replace the original one? Also, after installing the Collection patch, even after configuring DOSBox, the games still won't start in full screen mode, I have to alt + enter the DOSBox window each time.

All this makes me want to see proper ScummVM support for SCI even more. I can already see that the support is there, but it needs some serious tweaking. I'm really fond of KQ games and I want to be able to enjoy them without endless issues with configs, etc.

Sierra Help Pages sure seems like a great site, with patches and updates galore. I'm glad there's a whole community that cares about AGI and SGI games.

[MusicallyInspired]

When Sierra was bought out they took truckloads of valuable "junk" and just threw it all out in the dumpster (including a very sophisicated and efficient DAT tape voice recording machine setup that Al Lowe said was ahead of its time and worth thousands). The source code for old Sierra games doesn't exist anymore unless one of the employees kept some (doubtful since someone would have come forward before now).

[MeddlingMonk]

(doubtful since someone would have come forward before now).

That's probably correct, but I still wouldn't rule it out. Keeping the source code would be a good idea for someone to have, but that someone would also realize that they were essentially stealing (the fact that the owner was throwing it out notwithstanding). Fear of prosecution would be enough to keep someone silent. Sometimes things like this only decades later, like after the "thief's" death.

[yeah yeah]

i saw a build on cydia (iphone), but it didn't detect any of the sierra games.

[MusicallyInspired]

I believe SCI support is disabled by default in the source for certain ports (most?).

[LordHoto]

I believe SCI support is disabled by default in the source for certain ports (most?).

It's actually (or rather should be) disabled for all ports. It seems though that at least the latest daily windows builds include all engines.

[Silver-Streak]

I've been using ScummVM forever with my old Monkey Madness cd, and just the other day thought that it'd be great if I could find something similar for Quest For Glory, which is one of my favorite adventure series of all time.

Then I did some searching, and found that FreeSCI is now (sort of) part of ScummVM. A few weeks ago I downloaded one of the daily builds, and it allowed me to load up QFG2, which was fantastic. Unfortunately, my disks of QFG1 VGA didn't work with it. However, when I downloaded the latest daily build, none of the SCI games will load. Double clicking just makes the menu flash for a second.


Does anyone have/know of a Daily build that will play QFG1VGA? Or does anyone know if I'm doing something wrong with the current Daily build that makes it not load any of the SCI games, plus barely react?


Any/all info is greatly appreciated.

(and I apologize about the wall of text)

[dreammaster]

Does anyone have/know of a Daily build that will play QFG1VGA? Or does anyone know if I'm doing something wrong with the current Daily build that makes it not load any of the SCI games, plus barely react?

It's a standard practice when a new release is upcoming that all the engines that aren't going to be part of the release get disabled for daily builds. This is because we fork the code into a 'release branch', and the daily builds only compile from that. This is to make it easier for people to test the latest release candidate as testing and final bug fixing occurs.

[yeah yeah]

i had one daily build that played a number of SCI games. decided to upgrade to an updated version of a daily build, and all the SCI games stopped working.

...either way, the build that i did have working, qfg1&4 weren't working. crashed on the spot.

[Parhelion]

It's a standard practice when a new release is upcoming that all the engines that aren't going to be part of the release get disabled for daily builds.

So SCI won't be officially supported for the 1.0 release? Why would you choose now for such an important milestone when one of the most highly anticipated updates in ScummVM history is right around the corner? I know it's only a number, but still . . .

On a side note, FreeSCI had some really cool options for enhancing the graphics of the 16 color games. Any plans to make those available through ScummVM?

[LordHoto]

It's a standard practice when a new release is upcoming that all the engines that aren't going to be part of the release get disabled for daily builds.

So SCI won't be officially supported for the 1.0 release? Why would you choose now for such an important milestone when one of the most highly anticipated updates in ScummVM history is right around the corner? I know it's only a number, but still . . .

Well there had even been some discussions to for the "1.0.0" release by the release cycles for older releases. Back then the missing manual was the main reason not to do that. Since it turned out, that we probably have to wait forever to the manual to finish (even though there seems to be some work on it recently), we decided to just name the current release 1.0.0.

Also the SCI engine might have some regressions over FreeSCI AND of course FreeSCI itself was not perfect, so before SCI will be 'finished' there'll be still a long time to pass. On the other hands the SCI team has some plans to announce some selected titles as supported for the next release (thus 1.1.0). Of course those might be only a few games, not the majority of SCI games.

Personally for me including SCI would be one of the last reasons to wait longer for a 1.0.0 release. I think some missing (and in the works / nearly finished) features for SCUMM (and other existing engines) would've been much nicer to have in 1.0.0, like TFMX for MI1 Amiga. But I can understand why we chose to release this one as 1.0.0 and I think it's fine.

And just FYI we make this release 1.0.0, because if we wait for "nice features around the corner", we will probably have to wait forever to release a 1.0.0. After SCI is 'done', there's probably another thing people would like to see in ScummVM 1.0.0, which is in the works by then.

Also you have to acknowledge that ScummVM is not intended to always add support for new engines and thus waiting for an engine to be finished is probably a pretty weak argument against a major release. SCUMM itself misses some features and still it is pretty mature and probably like 80-95% of the users out there don't expire any problems / missing features, so this is a far more important point to consider about 1.0.0. And last but not least the project is named ScummVM, thus it would be strange to have a milestone for the first major release to be set on support for SCI ;-).

[derboo]

And last but not least the project is named ScummVM, thus it would be strange to have a milestone for the first major release to be set on support for SCI .

Well, it's a strange thing with the name nowadays, anyway .

[soulafein]

Is there any chance of supporting Gabriel Knight in ScummVM??