General
- Add proper support for the Accolade MIDI format uesd by the PC versions of Elvira 1, Elvira 2, Waxworks and Simon the Sorcerer 1 (DOS Floppy Demo). Currently invalid data is often passed through the MIDI parser, causing crashes.
- Use actual timer, for timer_callback() and timer_proc() code, to match exact timing of the original games.
Elvira 1
- Add support for the 'INSTR.DAT' Adlib instrument bank in the DOS version.
- Add support for drawing inventory arrows (hard coded image).
- Add support for music in Atari ST version (The format is unknown).
- Add support for load/save screens.
- Add support for text format differences in Atari ST version.
- Fix background glitches on pause options in Amiga and Atari ST versions.
- Fix incorrect drop point, when picking up items.
- Fix incorrect palette for print scroll, during many scenes.
Elvira 2
- Add support for the 'INSTR.DAT' Adlib instrument bank in the DOS version.
- Add support for music in Atari ST version (The format is unknown).
- Add support for sound effects (Adlib format?) in the DOS version, which are stored in the 'mylib.fxb' file.
- Fix the incorrect palette shown for interface (Lower parts) in Atari ST version. The correct palette is only shown when mixing options, restore options or save options are displayed.
- Fix highlighting of names through invertbox() sometimes been cut off, on the left side.
Waxworks
- Add support for loading room state resources from 'statelst' in PC version.
- Add support for loading and saving room state data.
- Add support for loading restart state in Amiga version.
- When prompted to choose a response or when a response is shown, the text is often displayed, before the background window. Which causes the text to be overwritten.
Simon the Sorcerer 1
- Add support for Desktop Tracker format used for music in the Acorn disk version.
- Add support for drawing inventory arrows in Amiga OCS version.
- Add support for the 'mt_fb.ibk' Adlib instrument bank in DOS versions.
- Fix palette issues in Amiga OCS version.
- Fix load/save interface in Amiga CD32 version.
Simon the Sorcerer 2
- Add support for language files used by Amiga and Macintosh versions.
- Add support for music fade out in vc62_fastFadeOut() when changing locations.
Feeble Files
- Add support for resuming position of last OmniTV video, after changing rooms.
- Work around the scrolling glitch when repair man comes to fix the car, which occurs in original too. A race issue, the screen scrolling should have completed, before the video is played.
- Fix occasional glitch when scrolling text in Oracle interface. See this series of screenshots from the DIRECTIVE CHARTER article. (It happens in other places as well.) This is actually not a bug in the Simon engine, but rather a problem with the automatic calculation of dirty rects that we use to speed up full screen updates in some engines. Maybe the checksum algorithm is more likely to fail when there are only two colours involved?
- Currently, it is difficult to extract the Feeble Files .cab files for people on non-windows systems. Sadly, unshield does not properly support the FF .cab files. It would be nice if somebody could work on this. Maybe looking at the i5comp source code could help.
Some observations about the missing line breaks
(This text is kept for historical purposes. The line break bug should be fixed now.)
In the article titled THE COMPANY, only the first line is broken. The subsequent lines are not. The reason for this can be found in showmessage_print_char(): Every time an end of word (character codes 0, 10 or 32) appears, the function will check if the currently buffered word fits on the line or not:
} else if (chr == 0 || chr == ' ' || chr == 10) {
uint count = (getGameType() == GType_FF) ? _printCharPixelCount + 1 : _printCharPixelCount;
if (_printCharMaxPos - _printCharCurPos >= count) {
_printCharCurPos += _printCharPixelCount;
The test checks if the remaining space on the line is larger than the length of the buffered word, i.e. if the test succeeds the word will fit. In this case, _printCharMaxPos is always 360.
At the first line break, _printCharCurPos is 325 and count is 40. The word does not fit, and therefore the line is broken.
Where the second line break should be, _printCharCurPos is 366 and count is 25. At first glance it looks like the test will fail, because the remaining space is negative. However, we're using unsigned variables, so what at first apperas to be a small negative value is actually a large positive one.
So how did this happen? Shouldn't the line have been broken at the previous word? No, in fact it should not. At that point, _printCharCurPos is 327 and count is 32. The word fits, just barely, and _printCharCurPos is increased to 358. Problem is, the line break check is triggered, here as almost always, by a space. And in that case the width of that space will also be added to _printCharCurPos, bringing it up to 366.
There are several possible fixes. A few that come to mind:
- Change the variables from unsigned to signed.
- Check for overflow before adding the width of the space. (This may be what it's trying to do already by checking if _printCharCurPos == _printCharMaxPos.)
- Rewrite the test so that signedness doesn't matter, e.g. if (_printCharCurPos + count < _printCharMaxPos)
Oddly enough, the original does use unsigned variables, and take none of these precautions. Is it possible that the compiler Adventure Soft used behaved differently (buggily?), or are we missing some subtle detail...?
Puzzle Pack
- Add support for displaying, entering, loading and saving high scores in each game.
Demon In My Pocket
- Timing code seems too slow, the demon takes a very long time to die.
Swampy Adventures
- Add support for entering nickname at start of the game (Uses Windows fonts).
- Add support for displaying rollover text, which displays explanation when clicking on items (Uses Windows fonts).