Support for Prezzemolo games?

[Tom S. Fox]

Would it be possible to add support for the games Prezzemolo in una giornata da incubo and Prezzemolo in un viaggio da sogno?
They're only available in Italian, but I have absolutely not been able to get them to run properly on Windows 10 (well, I only tried the first one, but I think they run on the exact same engine).

First of all, the installer refuses to even install it (at least on the 64-bit version of Windows 10). I tried running it on a virtual machine with Windows Vista installed on it (the games run perfectly on my old Windows Vista computer), but there were two problems:

• the prerendered cutscenes only had audio, no video, and
• VirtualBox's 3D acceleration didn't display the 3D models correctly (I can post a screenshot if you want me to).

I also tried copying the installed files from my virtual hard drive to my real hard drive and then starting the game in Windows 10. It was playable that way, but once again, the prerendered cutscenes wouldn't work properly. This time, it spat out a 0x80004002 error warning whenever it tried to play one.

By the way, if you want to know what the games look like, here are let's plays of them:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I0eCWCic52w
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KIU86ciJoEQ

[Nitrus]

Hello Tom,

In order for those games to work in ResidualVM, support will need to be added for their engines, and appropriate asset loading logic put into place.
For new engines, it is usually a manual, arduous process that can take quite some time. ResidualVM holds, in fact, reimplementations of the original game engines.

Unless these games share the Grim/E, Myst3 or Stark engines - which I doubt, I'd say that you'd need to find a dedicated developer who enjoyed these games, or sees a challenge in adding support in ResidualVM for them.
For the RE process the language doesn't usually matter that much, though seeing as the games themselves are only in Italian, I would wager that an Italian-speaking developer(s) would be more interested in taking on the task than people who don't speak the language, as they are likely to enjoy it more.

ResidualVM is open source, therefore anyone can contribute a new engine (written according to convention and subjected to peer review in pull requests).

[Botje]

I download the demo and installed it in a Windows 10 VM using WinXP compatibility mode.
From a quick look, it does not resemble any engines we currently support.
The files in the various sub-directories seem to be plain zip files that contain some binary files.
I could not quickly (less than 5 minutes) find any separate scripting language files, but maybe they are embedded in the locations...

[Tom S. Fox]

I download the demo and installed it in a Windows 10 VM using WinXP compatibility mode.

Did it run correctly?

EDIT: It seems I never tried to run the installation program in compatibility mode, even though I thought I did. But the prerendered cutscenes still don't work, and that can't be fixed even by compatibility mode.

[Botje]

I only installed it to estimate how much effort it would be to reverse engineer the files, I did not try to run it. You can probably figure out which codec is needed by looking at the files.