Second Week – some bugs and new stuff

This week’s plan was to get the STUBs done. At their current state, I won’t say ALL of them have been addressed, but yes, very few of them remain, and some of them can’t be done right now (more on that). This week’s work can be seen here.

The STUB list can be referred to know the current state of STUBs.

  • LB::b_saveMovie() : something sev mentioned on the #director-engine channel. This would be a project in itself and there is no code around it. Saving is currently not supported in ScummVM’s Director Engine and this STUB would need some time to be implemented.
  • LB::b_setCallBack() : This needs to be adressed when I encounter this command while playing one of the director targets. The documentation to this is vague. here:

    • The third point is not very clear. It appears as if this would involve the implementation of the specific factory object, and the interactions between that and the XCMD or XFCN callbacks are not generalised.
  • LB::b_playAccel() : Deprecated since D3
  • LC::cb_v4theentitypush – kTEAMenuIdItemId andĀ LC::cb_v4theentityassign – kTEAString : These will also be implemented when I encounter their usage. The MenuIdItemId is probably creating menus from scripts, but that is just speculation. I haven’t encountered their usage and their purpose is not documented, so I would have to encounter them first
  • LM::m_moveToBack() and LM::m_moveToFront() : These will be tackled along with this.

There were some things which were fixed this week, like checking for constraint before rendering sprites, acknowledging movable sprites as active.

There are some things which ScummVM would never be able to fully support, like openDA and closeDA, which open the Macintosh’s Desk Accessories like calculator. To be honest, I don’t thin many games which target both Windows and Mac might be using it. There is the open comman too which opens any document in the application specified. ScummVM can’t run arbitrary applications.

I took the liberty of modifying some commands in the way they work (these commands were mainly used for debugging in Lingo and sev said that those are basically no ops for us, so can be ignore) like showResFile and showXlib as we have a REPL Lingo debugger in ScummVM.

While I looked into importFileInto cast Lingo command, we realised that the BitmapCastMember uses PICT files. So I would be porting WAGE’s PICT handling code for that. The remaining STUBs (5 exactly: param, importFileInto and special cases of framesToHMS, HMStoFrames and openResFile) I intend to do in the next couple of days (param has a bug which I can hopefully solve tonight, importFileInto would need work and for the others, I must discuss with sev and others.)

So this week, I can start looking at Meet Mediaband. Personally, I have never seen anything more interestingly weird than that. There are bugs in UNDO ME, Macaroni Man and HOUSE JAM, and the popupMenuXObj needs to be implemented. I had alotted 4 weeks of time to work on Meet Mediaband, and I believe that would be enough to fix it and clear up my trello cards too! Hoping for a productive week ahead.

2 replies on “Second Week – some bugs and new stuff”

Does this secondarily mean HyperCard needs to be implemented in the future too? Are there Director games that use HyperCard too?

Yes, that seems to be the case. rvanlaar mentioned some targets which use the PACo player, and “STNG Technical Manual” which made use of setCallback. So we might need to do it for some targets.

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