Month: April 2008

I decided in order to get a better understanding of the fundamental concepts used in all digital audio systems, I would need to do a little background reading. I searched for the right books until I found what I was looking for; Musimathics: The Mathematical Foundations of Music. Over two volumes, it seems like it covers all the right topics especially regarding the digital sampling of audio. All of this stuff does not directly apply to the coding that needs to get completed, but it will provide some important clarification regarding some key fundamental topics. Check out the links below.

Musimathics, Volume 1: The Mathematical Foundations of Music
Musimathics, Volume 2: The Mathematical Foundations of Music

Playing around with the file structure of the AMIGA Monkey Island demo, I’ve managed to extract the TFMX audio files. Fortunately, from my initial digging around, it seems that the demo actually contains the entire music track for the full game. More on this later.

In the meantime, Grand Theft Auto IV has me a little distracted…

Hello folks and welcome to my blog. My name is Marwan Hilmi. I am a 21 year old Computer Engineering student at Concordia University in Montreal, Canada. I’ll be using this site to keep track of progress as my Google Summer of Code project for ScummVM gets underway.

Google Summer of Code aims to encourage students to become involved in open-source software development. I’ve chosen to apply my knowledge of C++ and my love of games to aiding in the development of ScummVM. As a collection of virtual machines, ScummVM allows users to play a variety of classic games on several platforms. As I grew up playing many of the LucasArts classics that ScummVM was built to support, I was immediately drawn to this project. Specifically, my task involves creating an interpreter for two audio formats commonly used in AMIGA games. This interpreter will read TFMX files from “The Secret of Monkey of Island” and MaxTrax files from “The Legend of Kyrandia: Book 1″. This interpreter will be built on top of software emulated PAULA hardware (the native AMIGA audio chip). I’m glad to have been accepted as one of six students and look forward to getting started.

For more information, check out the links below. Feel free to stop by and make comments anytime! Stay tuned because many updates and changes will be coming. You can also reach me at the contact information given below.

EMAIL: mhilmi@gmail.com
MSN: marwanhilmi@hotmail.com
IRC: mhilmi on Freenode

LINK: ScummVM homepage.
LINK: GSOC 2008 homepage.
LINK: GSOC ScummVM profile.
LINK: My proposal.