Groovie, baby

If you can see it at this crap quality… I managed to get the animation frames working. Timing is not adhered to (by any means), but all the frames are in there.

ION, given I have 4 bluetooth devices, 2 of which have video cameras on, you’d think I’d be able to transfer the video easily. No. It was possible, but I had to open the linux app that received files. Would be good to have that built into the bluetooth, or at least the option to start it whenever a bluetooth device is connected. Anyway, done now. The next question is, will this video work?

OK, nobody get too excited (though I am, but I know what this is). At the moment, this is just reading the first frame of one of the animations. Don’t get me wrong, this is a big step, but … there is a whole 200 storey building to climb after this one :-). But still, yay!

Hmmm.
Looking at the LZSS decompresser in the scumm he engine, that works by just allocating big enough chunks of memory to decompress the entire stream. This is all fine and good. But *my* variant of LZSS doesn’t tell me how big the decompressed data is, only the compressed data. This, it turns out, is a bit of an arse.
At the moment I’m planning just to say “it’s never gonna be bigger than this” as a nasty hack, just to get something working. In the future, when I’m feeling a bit more confident, I’ll write an LZSS-compressed stream class (unless someone beats me to it :-).

Well, this is something of a non-post. Or at least, it will seem it to anyone that’s not me. I’m trying to get my engine to just play a vdx file first, just to find my feet. I’m getting my head round the way everything’s done in ScummVM, slowly, but it’s not helped by the fact that my C++ is rusty: I wrote the extraction tools in plain C. Might have to get a book out of the uni library tomorrow. Anyway, I have figured out how to draw to the screen, & open and read from a file… but now I’ve got to decompress a stream of data on the fly. In the tools I wrote before, I extracted to a temporary file, then read that back in. I knew it was a hack, and that I’d have to do it properly, but just sort of ignored it. Thankfully, there is already an LZSS decompresser in the SCUMM engine: it uses different settings so I can’t use it, but I should be able to use it as reference.

Man that was a boring post. Maybe next time I’ll have some pretty pictures… hopefully.

Well, I finally managed to get an empty engine compiled into ScummVM, yay! I’ve not heard back from the ScummVM leads yet, but that’s ok: even if it won’t be part of ScummVM, the ScummVM app means I don’t have to worry about getting my own graphics / sounds setups, etc.

Hmmm… as pointed out on #scummvm, Google seemed to be put out by me claiming that Googling “t7gre” did not find my blog, and now it very much does. Do they only list blogs that have been posted in recently maybe? I’ve googled occasionally for this in the past, and it seems rather sporadic whether it appears or not.
Anyway, I’ve emailed the leads of ScummVM now, to get their input on whether ScummVM could include T7G at some point in the future.

Well, disassembling doesn’t scare me as much as it did. Which is obviously a good thing. I used the free version of IDA, and it looked like I could get some good stuff out of it (bit tired tonight though). The only thing is that it won’t look at the dos executable (i.e. the original), because it’s only a demo (the full versioin will hack into any executable you care to throw it at, by all accounts). Thankfully there is a windows executable (available from the links on the left), but I can’t help feeling that I should be using the DOS one. I imagine it to be simpler, but maybe I’m making that up.

I don’t wanna!

Well, tonight I got a mention on #scummvm. To answer the questions that were asked there, the reason I haven’t discussed this with the ScummVM team is because I wanted to get a foothold on it before asking. That stage was to come soon enough.

But now I’m intrigued. This blog doesn’t even show up (atm) if you google for t7gre… how on earth did it get stumbled upon? Bizarre. Ah well. I just have to assume now that someone might actually be reading this 🙂

It turns out the music, contained in the XMI.GJD file, is in xmidi format. Which scummvm already supports. Woohoo! This says to me that the next stage is probably going to be adding the engine to scummvm … a big task.

Oh, and I’m going to rename all the files so they have small letters. internally they’re all referred to in small letters, so for the time being I may as well be consistent. Eventually I guess it’s gonna have to cope with both, but I prefer the idea of being short-sighted for a bit.

And I’m going to redo the database, this time with all the unknown data values, and possibly bytecode totals for all the resources. Maybe. Still haven’t decided what format the database should be in, I’m having a go with OpenOffice database, seems ok. Whether it’ll read in comma delimited data, who knows…