Hey there!
Last week, I added palette support for Director 3 movies, so several more games had their colouring issues on their opening movies resolved. Then, I spent much of Tuesday and Wednesday fixing issues with our path-loading code that prevented several of @trembyle’s testing titles from running – no less than 7 when you account for Windows and Mac versions. Lingo provides several ways to interact with the filesystem. Some games asked you for a drive letter and would just loop endlessly if they would not find the file they wanted. Others were a bit smarter – on Windows, for instance, they would look for a hardcoded file name on all the drive letters and crash if there was no match.
In some cases, our file finder was not trying all the possible Director movie extensions on Macintosh, and others had filenames improperly converted from Macintosh long file names to the FAT 8.3 format. I actually just now saw that @trembyle notated several new titles with path/file errors, so I will probably look at those once I finish my current set of tasks:
Before @djsrv implemented the desktop mode, the Director transition drawing code was taking direct control of the screen (via copyRectToScreen). In the desktop mode, however, this would pay no respect to window layering or positioning. So I am working on improving screen access through the window manager. Currently the WM keep a copy of the screen as a surface, but I am exploring how to avoid this extra copying. This can cause performance issues, even in non-desktop mode, since the surfaces must be copied twice – from the Director sprite, onto the _screen, and from _screen onto the display device. Fixing this duplication will help the effort to support QuickTime video from Director movies.
In the last part of the week, I got distracted by my starting in earnest my first from-scratch RE of another engine. This is not for GSoC, just to satisfy my own curiosity. It’s the engine used by the one title in the Living Books series (D. W. the Picky Eater) that doesn’t use Mohawk. I understand the file format fairly well, and so the next task is extracting resources and then working toward the script bytecode. See my repo for more information.
Have a great week!