Simon the Sorcerer - Merge Talkie with Subtitles

[General_Toxic]

Hi All,
Working on a fun project that's making me scratch my head -

I want to 'merge' STS Talkie with the English Subtitles, quoting Kirben ScummVM dev from the forum;

"Unfortunately most of the subtitles were removed in the English and German versions of Simon the Sorcerer 1 (with speech). The subtitles were removed from the data files and the scripts altered to no longer display the subtitles in those cases. That is why subtitles are disabled under ScummVM."

Now, this is true, the English and German CD versions have subs removed, but the 25th anniversary edition on Steam does have both (and a new UI)

So I bought the Steam version and had a poke around, it seems to contain the DOS version, with the speech tracks added, not the other way around and it runs from a SCUMM engine (without the new UI) and has two launch options;

launch_game_win-subonly.bat
cd game
..\scummvm-win\scummvm.exe --config=configfile simon1-subonly
cd ..

launch_game_win-voiceonly.bat
cd game
..\scummvm-win\scummvm.exe --config=configfile simon1-voiceonly
cd ..

Now, I went one step further and rummaged in Simon 2 25th Anniversary too; that has an extra launcher

launch_game_win-voiceandsub.bat
cd game
..\scummvm-win\scummvm.exe --config=configfile simon2-voiceandsub
cd ..

Now my first thought was to drop that batch file into Simon1 and change the file paths, but no luck, it just starts the Voice version, no subs

So I thought let's find the sub files and add them to the DOS folder, I assumed they were here;
Simon1_data_all.bundle\En_sub

But no mix of files etc. seems to work - I also thought of getting the French talkie version, and replacing the Subtitle files with the English version, but this again eluded me.

I did a 'mass add' on my game files and it found some interesting results;
SCUMM finds 4 versions installed with the 25th anniversary edition-
Simon the Sorcerer 1 (CD/DOS/English) > Runs with Audio, no Subs
Simon the Sorcerer 1 (Floppy/DOS/English) > Fails ERROR: MidiDriver_Simon_1_Adlib::createMidiDriverSimonAdLib - could not find AdLib instrument bank file MT_FM.IBK!
Simon the Sorcerer 2 (25th Anniversary Edition/DOS/English) > Fails ERROR: MidiPlayer: could not open setup.shr
Simon the Sorcerer 2 (CD/Windows/English) > Runs fine, talkie and subs

Now - I dug deeper and when I was 'mixing' files to try and fool the game into displaying English suns in the GME files it found an 'unknown' version of Simon and Elvira in the Steam folder (?)

Both failed to launch.

Anyone want to help solve this mystery? If we do there will likely be a lot of STS fans happy to get the talkie and subs version on Scumm natively.

If I had to guess for the 25th Anniversary edition they somehow run both versions simultaneously? there's a new UI menu that looks like it's been coded in and for Windows, so SCUMM can't interpret this as part of the game.

[eriktorbjorn]

I don't know much about AGOS, the engine that powers Simon the Sorcerer, but I thought the subtitles were baked into the game scripts themselves, i.e. not separated from the game logic. Which would imply that there's no subtitles file that can just be replaced.

I don't have the anniversary edition, so I don't know that that one does though.

[invwar]

As I am aware, there are some international versions out there that have subtitles and Audio at the same time. For example the spanish and hebrew version. Of course, the text is in spanish, but this wouldnt be so hard to replace, if someone really want to make it working.
But this is all theory, as I don't own these versions.

[General_Toxic]

So it seems I've been hit with a Mandela effect -

In my insistence this version existed I scoured eBay and found a copy of the exact disk version I had for Windows; but low and behold - No subs.

STS is version 1.0 and STS2 is version 1.1 (not sure on the difference)

So still no joy, but at least I have a disk version....

As the post above, I wouldn't have thought swapping out the subtitle file would be difficult, but I just can't find a way to do it...

Frustratingly, I can find the English and German Windows CD's, but only DOS CD's for the others (this is on Ebay, so legit) so comparing the two versions is tough.

[rzil]

Hi, which version of ScummVM did you try using?
I think the latest version (from this website) should be able to open and play the 25th Anniversary Edition as well
which already does have subtitles and voice at the same time.

If it still does't work, and you go in "edit the game" route
or someone would like to translate to another language,
or mix language and voice of different language,

you might want to check out MAGOS
https://github.com/adventurebrew/magos
which able to modify the games texts and scripts.

please feel free to contact me for support with the tools (I'm the author)

[General_Toxic]

Hi, which version of ScummVM did you try using?
I think the latest version (from this website) should be able to open and play the 25th Anniversary Edition as well
which already does have subtitles and voice at the same time.

If it still does't work, and you go in "edit the game" route
or someone would like to translate to another language,
or mix language and voice of different language,

you might want to check out MAGOS
https://github.com/adventurebrew/magos
which able to modify the games texts and scripts.

please feel free to contact me for support with the tools (I'm the author)

Wow - Thanks for this; even just having a rummage around is helpful.

I never realised the whole games code was in French too! that seems like an awful lot of work to translate even the base code....

Anyway, in my investigations I've now found it seems the subs for the English version are there, I can see them, edit them, change them and re-compile them so there's that.... still can't get them to ‘display’ though.

I wonder if SCUMM is playing a part here as in audio settings I can't select 'both' but can for the French version.

The initial plan of modifying the French version may now not work as even the UI and games code is in French that's a lot of work...

I can't figure out how they've disabled the subs on the English version.

I can however potentially edit the French version to display English subs now I've had a play.

I guess it's just the UI that needs fixing now, but how the heck do you do that??

thanks again for this amazing tool, really helpful

[General_Toxic]

UPDATE:

It seems SCUMM doesn't like the new versions I've 'edited'

The game in 'STSFR\' 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 agos engine: simon1

{"stripped.txt", 0, "ef51ac74c946881ae4d7ca66cc7a0d1e", 252},
{"gamepc", 0, "3cfb9d1ff4ec725af9924140126cf69f", 39310},
{"icon.dat", 0, "22107c24dfb31b66ac503c28a6e20b19", 14361},
{"tbllist", 0, "d198a80de2c59e4a0cd24b98814849e8", 711},

Is there a way to 'force' run Scumm games?

[Raziel]

There should be a button down in ScummVM's launcher called "Add anyway".

With this you get the "unknown variant" in your games list and can start it...and maybe crash, but still

[General_Toxic]

There should be a button down in ScummVM's launcher called "Add anyway".

With this you get the "unknown variant" in your games list and can start it...and maybe crash, but still

I never did find this button; but someone has already reported the problem;

https://bugs.scummvm.org/ticket/13927

Looks like STS2 got fixed and added, now we need STS1 and hope it's modified to display both Subs and Audio - Is it worth a bump to whoever is in charge of adding MD5's?

[Raziel]

Maybe it's easier if you join discord?

Stuff on the forums tend to get forgotten

[General_Toxic]

Maybe it's easier if you join discord?

Stuff on the forums tend to get forgotten

I tried to, but I need to verify my phone number - which for various reasons I refuse.

Back to the drawing board then, unless someone could poke a dev for me...

[Raziel]

Or you could add a PR to github with your StS 1 checksums?

[Kirben]

To clarify, and save you wasting more time:
MojoTouch added back the subtitles in a few scenes, via nasty hacks (see their source code for more information). They are still using the original data files from long ago...for their so called 25th Anniversary Edition.
The English subtitles can't be added back to the English & German CD version of Simon the Sorcerer 1. They didn't just remove the subtitles, they removed the actual string identifiers (numbers) in the scripts too.

A combined speech & subtitles multi-lingual version (French, Hebrew, Italian and Spanish) exists, which still uses the English voices. It could be translated to English, with a lot of work. Except you would need to import the English differences in the graphics too (i.e. verb names).

[rzil]

UPDATE:

It seems SCUMM doesn't like the new versions I've 'edited'

The game in 'STSFR\' 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 agos engine: simon1

{"stripped.txt", 0, "ef51ac74c946881ae4d7ca66cc7a0d1e", 252},
{"gamepc", 0, "3cfb9d1ff4ec725af9924140126cf69f", 39310},
{"icon.dat", 0, "22107c24dfb31b66ac503c28a6e20b19", 14361},
{"tbllist", 0, "d198a80de2c59e4a0cd24b98814849e8", 711},

Is there a way to 'force' run Scumm games?

Thank you, fallback detection for Simon the Sorcerer games was added in https://github.com/scummvm/scummvm/pull/4949
so it should allow force adding the modified games in the latest daily build,
and will allow keeping the detected game with the changes after more modifications.

[invwar]

Yes, I just took a look into the magos extracts. Some of the text links still exist, so maybe you could even add them back. But looking at the extract of my Floppy version with my CD version, the extracted script links are mostly complete different. This would make the whole process very tedious. The script extract for the CD version results in 1279 lines, the floppy has 4036.
But the major issue is that we can't activate the text anyway yet, I wouldn't even mind to do this, if it would be relative easily possible. Thanks to magos, it seems at least feasible. Unfortunately magos seems to have issues with the floppy version, because it not yet uses the SIMON.GME, i guess. Maybe rzil can give feedback on this. Would anyway like to maybe talk more directly to you, to understand the code better.
Reminds me on my desperate attempts to somehow translate Warcraft Adventure into German.

@General_Toxic: The german version still has english code.