On Feb 22, 6:37=A0am, ale...{at}mac.com wrote:
> Just to clarify a few things (and it's all still theoretical BTW):
>
> There is no way in hell that the IIGS will ever play Day of the
> Tentacle. It uses 256 colours for all the graphics. The is no version
> of this game that uses a smaller colour depth.

Not in the native format that SCUMM stores graphics, of course not.
I'm pretty confident there's a way to write a dithering algorithm that
can create an optimal set of palettes and dither each scan line with
the best-fit palette, etc.  That being said, I didn't say you'd be
running the game in a SCUMM engine.

> You can't just convert the graphics or music to a IIGS format if you
> intend on using SCUMMVM to help. SCUMMVM is an interpreter, similar to
> the original run-time interpreters that shipped with the original
> games and all it does is load the scripting, graphics, music and sound
> data as it was originally laid down in the SCUMM framework that Lucas
> Arts developed to make the creation of their adventure games easier.

No, you can't.   But if you know the inner-workings of the SCUMM data
format you can treat it as source code and compile it to something
more optimized for the target platform.  Problem is you have to write
that compiler to make it work. ;-)

> The part of my blog post covering Monkey Island graphics from the
> Amiga version is even more of a pipe-dream for getting SCUMM games to
> run at all on the IIGS. To do that would require a complete re-write
> of the runtime application to produce the game - you couldn't call it
> SCUMM. It'd be something new for the IIGS.

I just got some pictures displaying in ][ hi-res in a somewhat
passable way.  I didn't say it would look pretty, just that it might
be possible.  I wonder if the intro animation sequence could be
rendered fast enough?

> A SCUMM interpreter for the IIGS has to be able to read those same
> scripting, graphics, music and sound data from the existing data files
> (preferably from the PC versions as I've reasoned in my original blog
> post). You can't pre-convert the music to MIDISynth because the music
> is played from SCUMM itself. If a IIGS version was to be made, you've
> got to channel the output of the SCUMM interpreter through the
> MIDISynth tool on the fly.

Again, I didn't suggest a runtime interpreter.  I suggested something
that could compile to native code.

> And yes, you can't just compile SCUMMVM for the IIGS. A SCUMM run-time
> application would require some serious re-working for the IIGS, to
> allow individual scenes to be loaded as they're needed and then
> removed from memory as you progress to other scenes in the game...and
> lots of other things to accomodate for the IIGS, just as they needed
> to back in the 80s and 90s when the games were originally released.

In the spirit of using newer technology to solve the problem, I'd
probably do as much as I could with the programming tools I use daily
(e.g. Netbeans, ACME, etc).  So really, the majority of the problem is
something you could solve in a more convenient high-level and/or
object-oriented environment and use that to render down the executable
and music/image data in a //gs format.   After seeing "Out of this
World" and Wolfenstein run on a //gs, I'm just going to assume that
there's some more untapped potential there.

> It's all confusing, to be sure, especially when I need to go to
> bed :-)

I hear ya.  My curse is ideas like this keep me up until I can find a
solution that is at least somewhat plausible, only then can I put them
on the back-burner and go back to what I should be doing.   :-D

-B
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