A blog about my interests in diassembling old adventure games, and what I'm up to
It's the beginning of 2026, the start of a whole new year. Lets hope it's a good one. The last year was somewhat trying for me. Not only was there a lot of effort into getting the second M4 engine game, Ripley's Believe It Or Not: The Riddle of Master Lu working, I transitioned straight into working on supporting the other Bagel engine game as well, Hodj n' Podj. And that.. oh that.. it was a game…
After 21 years, a lost engine returns to the fold with the merge of the Another World engine. Thanks to the hard work of cyx, whose original engine was originally merged in on May 5th 2004, but was shortly thereafter removed at the request of the original game's author. He was working on the 15th Anniversary release at the time, and wanted to avoid confusion. Now in 2025, some 21 years later,…
Seems like it's been a full year since my last blog posting. I think that at this point, I'll just have to accept that I'm not very good at making regular postings. At least you all can take solace that my output of work on implementing support for new games in ScummVM remains unaffected. :) So, what's been happening in the last year? Well, first of all, I finished implementing support for Might…
Welcome to 2023, everyone. It's now mid-month in January, and I'm back from my long overdue Christmas holidays. Unfortunately :). Whilst I did end up having to spend some of my time taking care of work, I still got significant time to rest, read some novels and, of course, muck around with ScummVM stuff :). As with several previous years, I mostly ended up fiddling around with my disassembly of…
With the end of the year upon us, I thought it was time to do a blog post. And then I double-checked, and realized that I hadn't actually done a blog post since the start of last year. Awkward! So, yes, it's definitely well past time that I did a new post :) Things have obviously moved on since the last time I posted. In that time, the AGS engine has been merged into master, and is now officially…
I only realized with the turning of the new year that I have characteristically, once again, fallen behind on posting interesting news in my blog. My bad. As many of you will already know, last year I got sucked into working on the Comprehend series of games as a sub-engine under Glk. They were an interesting early series of combination graphics and text entry games including Transylvania, Crimson…
Hey everyone. I hope everyone has done okay so far this year, considering the circumstances. On a more positive note, you will have seen we've recently announced the testing period for three of the games in the Ultima series of RPGs.. Ultima IV: Quest of the Avatar, Ultima VI: The False Prophet, and Ultima VIII: Pagan. Thanks go to the original projects and all the developers that previously put…
A little over a week ago, it finally happened. I had combined my various work on the Ultima games into a single branch, and it was merged into master. This means Ultima VI: The False Prophet (from Nuvie), and Ultima VIII: Pagan (from Pentagram) are now playable in daily builds. \o/. Ultima 1, as before, is startable, but still a work in progress, and work on that is on hiatus right now. The…
Once again, it seems I fell out of habit of doing regular blog updates. Though hopefully you'll at least be ameliorated by the fact that I have at least been busy over the last few months. With the start of 2020 finally upon us, I thought it would be an opportune time to summarize what I've been up to. First of all, the ScummVM Glk engine has been going well. Before I put it on hiatus late last…
Work on the ScummGlk engine is ongoing. Since Christmas holidays I've been primarily focusing on adding support for the version 6 graphical Infocom games to the Frotz sub-engine, with particular focus on Zork Zero to begin with. Whilst I don't count the version 6 games among the best of the original Infocom line-up, ScummVM has always been about providing as good a coverage of old games as…
Seasons greetings to all, and I hope everyone has a happy time as we finish 2018 and look forward to the beginning of 2019. As I sit in the Los Angeles airport writing this, I'm reminded yet again of how much fun I have doing reverse engineering, since even the smallest thread of work can lead you in unexpected directions as you trace the flow of what methods call a given method, and what methods…
One of the things I like about my work on ScummVM is that it's a hobby rather than a profession, which gives me the freedom to switch what I'm working on when I desire. I've previously had encouragement to resurrect my Gargoyle engine work from about a decade ago. It was an early attempt to add support for Frotz into ScummVM, and at the time it was rejected due to multiple reasons. It was specific…
After all this time, support for the Might & Magic Xeen games is finally close to being finished. It's currently the official testing period for all the Xeen games, and I've already had a whole bunch of useful bug reports, which I've all taken care of. At this point, it's almost certain that the Xeen engine, and games, will be supported in the next official ScummVM release. It's a nice feeling.…
I've spent the last week with an in progress working my way through Dark Side of Xeen. As of last night, I've mapped out the bulk of the southern side of the map up to the mountains, released the first stage of Queen Kallindra's castle, finished the Temple of Bark, and am just winding up clearing Sandcaster and it's sewers of enemies. I've identified and fixed multiple problems as I went, and not…
Good news on the progress of the Xeen engine in ScummVM. As of the weekend, I finally finished my first playthrough of Clouds of Xeen! I finally got to give smackdown on Lord Xeen, and watch the ending cutscene. Which I've admittedly previously seen multiple times when I was first implementing the code, but there was the emotional satisfaction of seeing it properly, rather than just using the…
As tempting as it would be to write this post yesterday on April Fools, I've left it to today to make a status update on my playthrough through Xeen. Work has been proceeding well. I've fixed lots of bugs that were identified by both myself and Dark-Star, who's been assisting me with preliminary testing. As of yesterday, I've: - Finished the Dwarf Mines - Mostly finished Rivercity (except for the…
The Xeen playthrough is finally in progress, having been restarted last night. And by the time I went to work this morning, the first town of Clouds, Vertigo, was completable. Huzzah. \o/. I did identify and fix some further problems, such as armor not equipping, reading the note in the Vertigo warehouse, and getting the experience from the mayor. Next stop will be the Dwarf Mines, which I don't…
After all the time spent both in development, and in hiatus, work on the Xeen engine nears it's completion. Last weekend, I finally considered the engine finally stable enough to start my first playthrough of the game. Though, unfortunately, that idea rapidly crashed and burned.. I immediately discovered a variety of bugs in my exploration of Vertigo that my previous casual testing hadn't…
Over the course of the Christmas holidays, I took the opportunity to take a break from working on completing the Might & Magic Xeen engine to do some further work reverse engineering and implementing code for my Legend Entertainment games engine in ScummVM. The result can be seen in a demonstration video on Youtube . For now, I've been focusing on disassembling two of the Legend Entertainment…
Hi everyone, Been a while since my last blog posting, despite regular protestations that I'd be posting more frequently. My bad. At least my development work has been proceeding with it's usual speed in the interim. The just released ScummVM 2.0 spurred me to write a blog posting. So what's been happening? First of all, as most will know, I finished work on Starship Titanic. So with the new…
It's taken so many nights spent slowly debugging the original executable versus my ScummVM implementation, but the final starfield puzzle of Starship Titanic is finally working. I'm not 100% happy with how the starfield rotates to selected markers when you've locked them in, but frankly, given that I've spent multiple months on disassembling, implementing, and fixing just this one puzzle, I'm just…
Since my prior posting earlier in the year, there's been a great deal of progress in Starship Titanic. I decided to put aside the problem of reverse engineering all the Star Map classes until I had the rest of the game working better. In that respect, I've made great strides since, as of last weekend, I was able to complete the entire "prologue" of the game That included using the computer,…
Hi all. Been a while since my last posting; and a hectic last couple of weeks. After flying down to Florida for a 4th July long weekend getaway, I was barely back before I had to get ready for a work trip to the west coast. Then I get back to two days of company photo-shoots, which kind of disrupted getting back to normal work; but no sooner than they were done, I come down with a cold and had to…
What began as a casual lunch-time activity (spread across many, many lunches), my work on Douglas Adam's Starship Titanic is finally starting to see significant results. See below for an example of the current progress from the start of the game: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8ypLR4fS6vE You can't get as far as the ship crashing into your house yet, but at least you can fiddle around with the…
Finally, after many years of half-hearted attempts, I've finally rewritten my RTLink decode tool practically from scratch to handle disassembling the RTLink/Plus overlay management used by the later Legend entertainment games. See rtlink_decode for the result. The original version of the tool was pretty dodgy, and pretty much hardcoded to only handle the MADS games (Rex Nebular, Return of the…