Dinotopia (1996) SAGA .hrs File Format

[isledinotopia]

Hey there.

I own the '96 Dinotopia PC game based on author James Gurney's books of the same name.



Got it from eBay years ago. Since it is out of print and anything available online is illegal (and lacking 90% of the gameplay since the live action video is missing, so why bother anyway?) I doubt you'll ever support it. But I have a quick question.

I'm doing a fan site for Dinotopia in general and I sent an email to Joe Pearce, co-founder of The Dreamer's Guild, asking is there was any way to view the ".hrs" file format used by their game.

His response was:

ScummVM has code to inspect a HRS file. See
https://github.com/scummvm/scummvm/tree ... gines/saga

Upon checking the link I found the development code but no program or anything I know how to use. Is there anybody who could assist, or at the very least get me on the right direction?

Here's some info:

"Dinotopia: CD-ROM Adventure Game For PC" (1996)
Developer: The Dreamer's Guild Incorporated
Publisher: Turner Interactive
Distributer: ?
Engine: SAGA (SAGA2)

[sev]

There is engines/saga/resource_hrs.cpp file which reads those files.

What exactly are you trying to achieve with this?


Eugene

[digitall]

If you mean a pre-existing tool to dump the HRS archive as separate image, sound and other data files, then no such tool exists.

Dinotopia uses the 2nd generation of the SAGA engine:
http://wiki.scummvm.org/index.php/SAGA

The code present in the ScummVM codebase is a partial reimplementation of the SAGA2 engine, which is disabled in releases as it is highly incomplete.

Currently Dinotopia only plays the introduction video, then the engine exits due to various missing or unimplemented code paths.

If you wish to try this yourself, you can try with the daily builds which have experimental/incomplete code enabled:
http://www.scummvm.org/downloads/#daily

However, you are free to create a tool yourself. You would need to be able to compile your own build from the source code, and understand C/C++ well enough to modify the existing code to do what you require:
http://wiki.scummvm.org/index.php/Compiling_ScummVM

However, we do not generally provide these kind of tools to extract original resources. This is partly as such tools are not the aim of the ScummVM project and partly due to the artwork rights issues discussed in http://wiki.scummvm.org/index.php/HOWTO-Fangames

[isledinotopia]

My goal was to view or extract the individual images and sounds as you would other older games to catalogue them and provide a couple samples on my website. You'll immediately go "ah, he's just trying to steal the artwork and audio" but that's not my intent.