Phantasmagoria subtitles function discovered

[Wesker]

I think this is relevant enough to be posted even though it's not ScummVM related.

Someone has managed to get a subtitles function out of Phantasmagoria, a game which was released with no subtitles function at all, same as its sequel, Gabriel Knight: The Beast Within and some other Sierra games. Regarding The Beast Within, thanks to an official Brazilian Portuguese release which had subtitles implemented, this function could be exported and therefore subtitled versions to languages like Spanish and English could be done based upon it. But this was never the case with either of the two Phantasmagoria games because they didn't have any official subtitled release.

This is the work of a group which operates as "Pakolmo Tradus", which is currently translating the first Phantasmagoria game to Spanish (neither of the Phantasmagoria games were released in Spanish back then, which is a shame, the same happened with the second Gabriel Knight game until that translation based on the Brazilian Portuguese release was done) and they are planning to release the translation next month.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cQiIDkkivO8

They haven't managed to get subtitles out of the FMV scenes so in that case they are applying "hard" subtitles directly to the video stream itself, sadly. But all in-game speech does seem to have subtitles displayed by the game, which is a novelty. You can see several tests in their Youtube channel done some months ago when they were figuring out how to get the subtitles code out of the game.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cmr7WsxeDLk

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XTymXsOlLj4

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KDrjygCA9vc

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zM6pcMFyHAo

I know ScummVM was planning to implement a subtitles function to certain games which didn't have it in the first place, but these SCI2 games are still not properly supported by ScummVM so I guess this is not related to that. It looks to me like there really was a subtitles function hidden in the code and these people have been able to get it out.

They are planning to do the same for the second Phantasmagoria game, by the way, although nothing has been showed regarding that one yet since they are targetting that translation for 2017 and I guess they are focusing to get this one out first.

[sev]

Yes, the work has been performed by the Mutimedia Mike.


Eugene

[Wesker]

Oh, thank you. I couldn't find myself any trace of the backstory regarding how this was achieved, just these proofs of subtitling the game present in that Youtube channel.

I guess Phantasmagoria: A Puzzle of Flesh will be done in a similar way. Too bad the same can't be for the FMV cutscenes, it would be better to have those functional subtitles rather than the ugly hardcoded ones, something that Gabriel Knight: The Beast Within is able to do for both in-game and FMV scenes.

[m_kiewitz]

It looks to me like there really was a subtitles function hidden in the code and these people have been able to get it out.

I have just tried around a bit.

I can get those hint keeper text windows, but it seems it doesn't work with audio at the same time atm. For those cases, I get a window, but "%" is written in it.

Which means script patches will be needed. Shouldn't be a big problem.

We already patched in such features for King's Quest 6, Laura Bow 2 and other games.

[Wesker]

I have just tried around a bit.

I can get those hint keeper text windows, but it seems it doesn't work with audio at the same time atm. For those cases, I get a window, but "%" is written in it.

Which means script patches will be needed. Shouldn't be a big problem.

We already patched in such features for King's Quest 6, Laura Bow 2 and other games.

They have already managed to get subtitle windows working with both text and audio at the same time. I suppose they have patched the scripts in the same or similar way you are intending to do with the game under ScummVM support, which should be all right. Don't forget to do the same with Gabriel Knight: The Beast Within (which got subtitles support enabled thanks to the Brazilian Portuguese commercial release) and see what can be done with Phantasmagoria: A Puzzle of Flesh, which this team is also intending to translate (although this one is a SCI3 game so I guess it will take longer to be supported).

By the way, they have just released their Phantasmagoria translation: http://www.pakolmo.galeon.com/Phantasmagoria1.htm