Congratulations and a couple of questions

[toology]

Great work! It always presented a problem for me to play the early windows titles and you have made the most elegant solution thus far!

How do you pick future projects? Are you contetrating on Sierra for now or are all old Windows adventures ok?

I have a couple of title suggestions for you to look at if you have the will and the time:

1. Black Dahlia: this great FMV game seems to work in modern Windows but the controls are waaay too fast, modern processors even seem to crash some puzzles because of the speed. I guess it would perhaps be easier than Sierra titles since it already manages to run in 32bit OS-es.

2. The X-Files. The only problem this game seems to have is using the old QuickTIme 4 format. Could you do to it what you did to Amber (which also used quicktime I think). The funny thing is that it wouldn't run in Vista, but it did in Ubuntu under Wine.

3. Morpheus: A great adventure game utilizing QuickTime Movies and VR. Also circa QuickTime 4 era, similar to above.

If you fix theese games by recoding the videos I'll gladly donate my processors time to do it.

As far as Sierra games go, Phantasmagoria I and Kings Quest VII should be right in your present area of interest.

So once again congratulations and a big thank you. Looking forward to future games (whatever they may be).

[Collector]

If you noticed, jafa has done an installer for one non-Sierra game, Amber: Journeys Beyond. He is working with 32 bit games. I am not sure if he wants to tackle 16 bit games, but most Sierra fans would want to see KQ6, first. There are not that many 32-bit SCI games and few 16 bit that did not come with a DOS interpreter. Both Phantasmagoria I and KQ 7 are 16-bit games. Even without any other issues with these games they would not work natively for any 64-bit Vista users. The good news is that DOS SCI games easily run in DOSBox with few issues. The Windows version of KQ7 will run on 32 bit XP (and I would imagine Vista 32, as well), but there is a timer bug that is impossible to get past on modern machines. DOSBox is the answer to this. but only version 2 of KQ7 came with a DOS interpreter, but I have made patch that can convert versions 1.4 or 1.51 to version 2 with the DOS interpreter.

For any of the Sierra DOS games, check out the New Installers for Sierra DOS Games page on The Sierra Help Pages. They install the games from the original media, apply all official patches and the NewRisingSun timer patches, preconfigures the games and automatically sets them up to run in DOSBox from a Windows shortcut like any native Windows program. They are compatible with XP/Vista, even 64-bit. For the 32-bit Windows games, of course, look here first.

[toology]

I saw the GK II installer you did, great job! I didn't even know it was needed, I switched to Vista 64 a couple of months ago. I'll be sure to try out the Quest for Glory installer. In any case, I hope that the ScummVM FreeSCI merger will cover most of Sierra games in a year or so.

Frankly I'm most interested about the QuickTime utilizing games. I have the latest version because of my iPod so I cannot even think about the old versions and I don't have Windows 98 to make a VM. So I'd like to know how did jafa get the videos etc running in Amber. It's these games that are the toughest, Sierra and Lucas Arts have a huge amount of dedicated fans like yourself sorting it out (again thanks for the hard work).

I have some experience in A/V compression in tools such as AviDemux, VDub, ffmpeg and so on, so I could perhaps try to change the format. The sad thing is that I don't know to code, so I couldn't possibly make the game utilize new movies.

[Collector]

QfG5 has QuickTime version issues, too. This can often be solved by downgrading your QuickTime, but as you said, this is not a viable solution in many cases. I am sure that there are a number of QfG fans that would love jafa to have a crack at this game. It is, after all, just about the last of the real Sierra games.

I would not look to the ScummVM/Free SCI merger producing results much faster. The best result is the GUI and portability that ScummVM gives it. It had no GUI and the Free SCI devs are mainly Linux users and as such the Windows port has often been neglected or poorly maintained. Sadly, the merger will not really bring faster development to the engine, itself, as it will be the same developers. Progress has always been painfully slow. My understanding is that SCI is a more complicated interpreter than most of the other engines included in ScummVM. Sierra also had a habit of hacking in what ever feature that they needed for the game that they were developing, so the interpreter would usually only work with that game. They had to keep the interpreter source with the game's source. The best thing that we can hope for is the higher visibility that ScummVM might attract more developers.

[toology]

Had no idea it was that complicated. I just saw that ScummVM's finglofin has added a lot of commits to FreeSCI in the last couple of days along with another developer. That seemed do be much more action than FreeSCI got by itself.

[Collector]

Perhaps. Free SCI's development has been slow to nonexistent. It may breath new life into it. Still it is for the Windows only games or the ones that the Windows version had something over the DOS version that it really matters. All of the DOS games run so well in DOSBox.