Book'em Danno

clone2727 · Post by **clone2727** » Mon Mar 28, 2011 3:04 pm

We're pleased to announce that the next release of ScummVM will have support for several "Living Books" games! It's time to relive your childhood memories (or memories of your children!) and dust off the old discs. The (sadly) now grown-up ScummVM team no longer has all of these games lying around, so we need your help in testing the games to weed out any remaining bugs.

The first batch of supported Living Books games consists of Just Grandma and Me (v1), Arthur's Teacher Trouble, Aesop's Fables: The Tortoise and the Hare, Ruff's Bone, The New Kid on the Block, Arthur's Birthday (v1), Little Monster at School, Harry and the Haunted House, The Berenstain Bears Get in a Fight, Dr. Seuss's ABC, Sheila Rae, the Brave, The Berenstain Bears in the Dark, Stellaluna, and most of Green Eggs and Ham. We hope to support the rest of the games in the future, but in the meantime, we hope that these are enough to keep our loyal users occupied.

Be sure to grab a daily build when testing. If you spot any bugs while enjoying these classic interactive stories, we'd really like to know. Be sure to post them to the bug tracker; and keep those bug submission guidelines in mind. And if anyone happens to take a few screenshots before nap time and wishes to submit them, we would be eternally grateful.

pacifist · Post by **pacifist** » Mon Mar 28, 2011 8:10 pm

Not sure if this counts as a bug, but I can't get ScummVM (using today's daily build) to recognise my copy of "Harry"... the game works fine under Windows 3.1 within DosBOX so I'm pretty sure it's not missing any files...

According to HARRY.512 it's "Harry and the Haunted House Version 1.1.

Which files are you using to detect the games?

Edit: Stellaluna v1.0 isn't detected for me either... neither is The New Kid on the Block Version 1.1 (demo), nor is Ruff's Bone Version 1.0 (although the demo works fine). And finally, Sheila Rae, the Brave version 1.0 doesn't work either.

Am I just using different versions to you guys? All these games work fine for me in Windows 3.1 but they won't pass the game detection in ScummVM...

Julien · Post by **Julien** » Mon Mar 28, 2011 9:13 pm

Hi pacifist!

Did the console say anything about unrecognized games and showed a list of files?

If so, you can report the unrecognized games on the bug tracker. You can find more info on how to do that here: http://wiki.scummvm.org/index.php/Repor ... _checksums

fuzzie · Post by **fuzzie** » Mon Mar 28, 2011 10:13 pm

pacifist wrote:Am I just using different versions to you guys? All these games work fine for me in Windows 3.1 but they won't pass the game detection in ScummVM...

Yes! Like we said in the news post, we don't have all the games to test with - for example, the ScummVM team has only seen the European version of Harry and the Haunted House. So it would be *really* helpful if we can add detection for all the other versions people have.

What we need to add support are the md5sums of the first 5000 bytes of the outline file (often named like HARRY.512, they're also often with an .LB extension or called 'outline' or 'bookoutline').

If you could follow the instructions on the page that Julien linked to and give us that information, we'd be very grateful and will add it in the next daily build. (And posting the information here on the forums would be just fine, although the bug tracker is fine too.)

pacifist · Post by **pacifist** » Tue Mar 29, 2011 6:01 pm

Can't get it to work... ScummVM isn't reporting the MD5 hashes, and nothing comes out if I pipe to a file - just the standard "ScummVM cannot find any game in this directory!"

I tried using md5deep as instructed but it just keeps returning to the command line without outputting anything.

clone2727 · Post by **clone2727** » Tue Mar 29, 2011 6:14 pm

pacifist wrote:Can't get it to work... ScummVM isn't reporting the MD5 hashes, and nothing comes out if I pipe to a file - just the standard "ScummVM cannot find any game in this directory!"

I tried using md5deep as instructed but it just keeps returning to the command line without outputting anything.

ScummVM won't report the md5 hashes because we don't have the file names entered in. They differ with each game (and between Windows/Macintosh versions on the same disc).

What is the line you're calling md5deep with?

fuzzie · Post by **fuzzie** » Tue Mar 29, 2011 6:25 pm

clone2727 wrote:What is the line you're calling md5deep with?

You should be running something like

Code: Select all

md5deep -p 5000 HARRY.512 | find /i "offset 0-5000"

but just

Code: Select all

md5deep -p 5000 HARRY.512

would be fine for these small files, if you're having problems (the 'find' is just to stop you from being flooded with huge amounts of output, for large files).

pacifist · Post by **pacifist** » Tue Mar 29, 2011 8:27 pm

Ah. It didn't work with the extra piping but the short version works fine...

All LB/512 files are smaller than 5k except for Sheila Rae which is 25k...

Harry and the Haunted House 1.1
HARRY.512
8d786f0998f27e44603a2202d6786c25

Stellaluna 1.0
STELLA.LB
763bb4a4721aebb5af316ca8e1b478ed

New Kid on the Block 1.1 demo
NEWKID.512
41e975b7390c626f8d1058a34f9d9b2e

Ruff's Bone 1.0
RUFF.512
3dbda0de6f47a64d1714d89f5a5f60d1

Sheila Rae the Brave 1.0
SHEILA.LB
c28a60f615a46384d9a8941fc5c89d63 offset 0-4999
2be58229e6b1da1e6ad813fb55d9d76b offset 5000-9999
6d75bb3be3412b5401e51d9bf47da06b offset 10000-14999
b79e3874e919c3aef3517de43f2ae8b8 offset 15000-19999
5efe9cbc55d72dc98b8b13aaafdbc203 offset 20000-24999
9e5b6deae6c887c3fe56c0fda3134275 offset 25000-25604

fuzzie · Post by **fuzzie** » Tue Mar 29, 2011 9:56 pm

pacifist wrote:New Kid on the Block 1.1 demo
NEWKID.512
41e975b7390c626f8d1058a34f9d9b2e

That's odd - that one should already work (and the copy on the demos server works fine for me).

I added the rest just now (in git revision 046a34bd), so they should work in the next daily build. Thanks.

pacifist · Post by **pacifist** » Wed Mar 30, 2011 5:48 pm

Thank you. I also have an md5 for "Just Grandma and Me". Unknown version number, but the meta file is called OUTLINE which suggests a later version - it also has a copyright notice of 1997, which would put it five years after the first release... presumably this is "Just Grandma and Me v2.0"?

Just to complicate things further, the OUTLINE only has entries for English. I'm sure this game had a Japanese option as well.... I wonder if it's some bizarre cutdown version...

MD5:
159c18b663c58d1aa17ad5e1ab1f0e12

On a related note, apparently the series had different language choices in different parts of the world - noteably some had a US release and a European release. Presumably this would affect the MD5s accordingly...

Due to the scarcity of the games I'm not sure what the best option would be, besides adding MD5s as people discover them...

fuzzie · Post by **fuzzie** » Wed Mar 30, 2011 6:36 pm

pacifist wrote:presumably this is "Just Grandma and Me v2.0"?

Just to complicate things further, the OUTLINE only has entries for English. I'm sure this game had a Japanese option as well.... I wonder if it's some bizarre cutdown version..

If the demo version (it's in the LB v3 sampler) is anything to go by, Just Grandma and Me v2.0 supports a whole range of languages, but it switches between them using scripting (it can do it on-the-fly) and an on-page GUI.

(The demo version of v2.0 also has a Lang="E" setting in the [Globals] section of the outline, which I guess you can look for if you want to verify it's v2.0.)

pacifist · Post by **pacifist** » Wed Mar 30, 2011 6:44 pm

Yes, it has a Lang="E" in [Globals] so I presume it's V2.0.

Just thought it was strange though as most other living books have individual MHK files for the different languages...

clone2727 · Post by **clone2727** » Wed Mar 30, 2011 6:45 pm

pacifist wrote:MD5:
159c18b663c58d1aa17ad5e1ab1f0e12

Added, thanks.

pacifist wrote:Just thought it was strange though as most other living books have individual MHK files for the different languages...

It seems like they changed that starting with the v3 games. It makes sense so they don't have to have multiple copies of every image around.

Retrodude · Post by **Retrodude** » Sat Apr 02, 2011 2:07 pm

It's not exactly a bug report, per se, but Arthur's Teacher Trouble shows up as "Arthur's Teacher Troubles" with an extra "s" at the end of Trouble. It's more of a typographical error than a game glitch, so I figured that it wasn't bug report material.
EDIT: Also, I noticed that with every Living Books game I briefly tested, the title screen introductions and dances do not loop like they're supposed to. I tested the games outside of ScummVM, and the title animations do loop there, so I believe it's a bug relevant to ScummVM.

clone2727 · Post by **clone2727** » Sat Apr 02, 2011 3:15 pm

Retrodude wrote:It's not exactly a bug report, per se, but Arthur's Teacher Trouble shows up as "Arthur's Teacher Troubles" with an extra "s" at the end of Trouble. It's more of a typographical error than a game glitch, so I figured that it wasn't bug report material.

Thanks, fixed