Drill a 3D alien moon, become an interplanetary hero!

[gu3]

Driller aka Space Station Oblivion (in the US), the FIRST supported game of the Freescape engine, is ready for public testing!

Published in 1987 by Incentive Software Limited, this revolutionary new engine allowed players to explore a solid 3D graphic environment with complete freedom of movement for the very first time in videogame history.

A new threat emerges after humanity abandoned a dying Earth to establish a new home on planet Evath. Evath's moon Mitral has turned into a gigantic gas time bomb. A meteor is also due to impact Mitral in the next several hours. You were chosen to secure each of Mitral's 18 sectors by positioning a drilling rig over the gas pockets in each sector before the meteor strikes.

Solve challenging riddles by relying on geological clues, intuition, or good old trial and error. To survive your mission, find Rubicon crystals to restore energy and destroy (or avoid) the Laser Beacons and Skanners left behind by the Ketars. Good luck!

Our reimplemented engine features graphics using software (TinyGL) or hardware mode (OpenGL) at arbitrary resolution. The initial Driller support is limited to DOS (EGA mode), Amiga and AtariST releases, but we hope to be able to add more soon! Please contact us if you have some other release.

To play any of these supported releases, you will need a daily development build. As always, please submit your bug reports to our issue tracker.

[GoodOldGeorg]

Driller DOS Demo
I found it on an old compilation CD, ScummVM did not recognize it:

ScummVM Report:
The game in 'Games\' seems to be an unknown game variant.
Please report the following data to the ScummVM team at https://bugs.scummvm.org/ along with the name of the game you tried to add and its version, language, etc.:

Matched game IDs for the cruise engine: cruise-gb
{"D1", 0, "edd57153197ef457f08eeea4d9339208", 16384},

DOSBox Title Screen:
https://i.postimg.cc/RVNhm4Bz/drilldem-000.png
DOSBox Demo Screen:
https://i.postimg.cc/X7kbtPZ0/drilldem-001.png

The Demo can be downloaded here:
https://mega.nz/file/tBIB1YgL#lcngK_1Mx ... I0D2yqowh4

[gu3]

This is amazing!, thanks a lot. I already started working to support this demo. The demo seems CGA only. This graphic mode support is planned, but I still need to work in a few change to render correctly the color patterns from the game.

Btw, any Freescape related demo for DOS will be awesome to have as well (e.g. Dark Side, Total Eclipse, Castle Master).

[GoodOldGeorg]

I added the two known zx spectrum driller versions to ScummVM.
The game IDs became the following: driller-zx and driller-zx-1.

When i running the 'driller-zx-1' set the ScummVM hung and gave this error message:
- ERROR: Missing border file 'driller-zx-1_ZX Spectrum.bmp' in data bundle!

I'm just guessing, but maybe that the definition of borderFilename should be specified differently in the '8bitBinaryLoader.cpp' file.

ScunnVM info: ScummVM 2.7.0git6692-gbfe85cdacda-dirty (Jan 5 2023 07:35:18)
Features compiled in: TAINTED Vorbis FLAC MP3 RGB zLib MPEG2 FluidSynth Theora AAC A/52 FreeType2 FriBiDi JPEG PNG GIF taskbar TTS cloud (servers, local) TinyGL OpenGL (with shaders)

[gu3]

Hey, thanks for the bug report. This one is a known (and annoying) issue that will affect all the freescape games. I should fix it soon. In the meantime, use a single game per platform and it should not fail (and don't forget to frequently update your daily build since I'm adding new stuff and fixes every day!).

[gu3]

I believe the issue should be fixed in https://github.com/scummvm/scummvm/comm ... 55fbd13ae1 but please test it if you can.

Thanks again!

[GoodOldGeorg]

I tested with the following gameIDs and they all started:
driller, driller-1, driller-zx, driller-zx-1, driller-cpc, driller-cpc-1, driller-cpc-2, driller-amiga, driller-st

The driller-cpc-3 'Virual Worlds' version has not started, but it is Not implemented yet (ERROR: Not implemented yet!)

ScummVM 2.7.0git6774-ga9bc03c393f-dirty (Jan 8 2023 11:03:20)
Features compiled in: TAINTED Vorbis FLAC MP3 RGB zLib MPEG2 FluidSynth Theora AAC A/52 FreeType2 FriBiDi JPEG PNG GIF taskbar TTS cloud (servers, local) TinyGL OpenGL (with shaders)

[gu3]

Sorry for the delay! Can you try again with the Virtual Worlds CPC? It should be implemented already in master.

[GoodOldGeorg]

Virtual Worlds CPC version also started.

ScummVM 2.8.0git662-gc6e9986e676-dirty (Jan 26 2023 08:24:44)
Features compiled in: TAINTED Vorbis FLAC MP3 RGB zLib MPEG2 FluidSynth Theora AAC A/52 FreeType2 FriBiDi JPEG PNG GIF taskbar TTS cloud (servers, local) TinyGL OpenGL (with shaders)

[gu3]

Thanks a lot!, if you find any other versions that is not detected, please let me know.

[GoodOldGeorg]

I found a Driller ZX Spectrum Demo in tzx format on the internet.
The tzx file and the longest data block extracted with tzxtools can be found here
https://mega.nz/file/wMw00RAB#IKYwC8yRi ... WHu2nJE4Po
The title screen
https://postimg.cc/bdZdWQV3

The ScummVM report:

Matched game IDs for the freescape engine: driller-zx
{"DRILLER.ZX.EXTRACTED", 0, "e571795806ed8a30df0fa3109eaa8ffb", 36000},

ScummVM 2.8.0git703-gdce0412e80f-dirty (Jan 28 2023 07:57:44)
Features compiled in: TAINTED Vorbis FLAC MP3 RGB zLib MPEG2 FluidSynth Theora AAC A/52 FreeType2 FriBiDi JPEG PNG GIF taskbar TTS cloud (servers, local) TinyGL OpenGL (with shaders)

[gu3]

I would love to support that demo, as well the other ZX demos, but I don´t know if the data/engine is properly separated. I cannot find any object corresponding to what is shown in the screen. The same happens with the other ZX demo: https://wiki.scummvm.org/index.php?titl ... trum_demos