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User:Buddha^/GSoC2007-ProjectDiary

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Buddha^'s Google Summer of Code 2007 Project Diary

Here's the archive of the project diary I kept during my Google Summer of Code 2007 participation.

2007-05-28 (Monday) - GSoC starts!

So the GSoC 2007's coding period started. I'm just getting started, I installed Ubuntu 7.04 on my Dell CPX laptop last saturday and got ScummVM to compile after some trying (Just playing with packages, knowing what to install etc. After all the needed packages were there, ./configure and make did the trick).

Right now I'm getting acquainted with ScummVM's internals & workings. And after knowing enough to do so I'll be working on AGI version fallback detection (sev did work on that previously).

Just installed Code::Blocks 2007-05-23 nightly build on my laptop.

So, I took some screenshots of most official AGI games. And submitted my first patch, woot! It was screenshots of Larry I (640x480, hq2x + aspect ratio correction turned on, opting + advpng -optimized).

2007-05-29 (Tuesday) - Taking screenshots of AGI games etc

Today I took and submitted screenshots for the following games (In addition to the Larry I screenshots I submitted yesterday):

Official Sierra AGI games:

  • King's Quest I, II, III & IV
  • Space Quest I & II
  • Police Quest I
  • Manhunter I & II
  • Gold Rush!
  • The Black Cauldron
  • Mixed-Up Mother Goose

Fanmade AGI games:

  • Voodoo Girl: Queen of the Darned
  • Space Quest 0: Replicated
  • Space Quest X: The Lost Chapter
  • Serguei's Destiny 1

And I also made small thumbs for most of the games like "Larry's head thumb" for the Larry series and a "Sarien head thumb" for the Space Quest series etc.

2007-05-30 (Wednesday) - Starting work on WinAGI's wag-file loading

Installed MinGW and MSYS on my desktop machine (It's got Windows 2000 on it) and compiled ScummVM on it.

Worked on *.wag file loading.

2007-05-31 (Thursday) - Made a quick & ugly rudimentary parser for WinAGI's wag-file loading

Worked some more on *.wag file loading. I've already got a *.wag file parser but it's not pretty :). I'll have to convert it into something better suited for ScummVM.

2007-06-03 (Sunday) - Made class for WinAGI's properties

Made a Doxygen documented WagProperty class that represents a single property from a *.wag file (That can be the game's ID, the game's author's name, an about message about the game, the last edit date of the game or something else). Made it so that you can just read a property's header and choose whether to read the property's data also into memory or just skip it (Useful when you know beforehand what properties you are interested in and what you aren't).

Made WagFileParser class use WagProperty when parsing the *.wag file.

2007-06-04 (Monday) - More work on the WinAGI's wag-file parser

Modified WagProperty class and implemented more of WagFileParser's needed functionality. Documented WagFileParser's implemented parts.

2007-06-05 (Tuesday) - Fallback detection and WinAGI's wag-file parsing continues

Worked on the WagFileParser and Agi::fallbackDetector related code.

2007-06-06 (Wednesday) - Ran into trouble with fallback detection

Installed Visual Studio 2005 Express edition because MinGW+MSYS-combo jammed my Windows 2000 machine some of the time when using make. Hopefully this'll work better...

Ran into trouble with the AGI engine's fallbackDetector-routine needing dynamic ADGameDescription-structs. ADGameDescription has constant strings in it and we'd need to use dynamic strings so it looks like something will have to change. Sev said he'll talk with someone about this. Otherwise it looks like I might be getting to submit my first code patch real soon now. We'll see how soon that'll be...

And about Visual Studio 2005 Express... it does work quite nicely at the moment, thank you :) (Knocks wood).

2007-06-07 (Thursday) - Finished fallback detection for the AGI engine

After some talk with a friend of mine and much talk with my mentor Sev about the problems with the current fallback detection system I set out to implement Fingolfin's suggestion.

Got it done! It took some hours though ;) And it compiles too... let's see about testing and hopefully my first code patch tomorrow.

2007-06-08 (Friday) - Communication lessons and first code patch

Talked with my mentor Sev and got a little wiser about portability. Now I know that seeking in files can be very slow on some platforms, like e.g. GP32. I had ignored Sev's advice on some code choices because I didn't think seeking in files would be an issue at all. There was some discussion and I'll try to be more frank and communicative about my own decisions and ask about the reasons behind others' choices in the future.

I think it's good to know the real reasons behind choices... in this particular case the reason for a certain coding choice was "We shouldn't do much file seeking because file seeking is very slow on some platform (e.g. GP32) that we support".

So I changed my WAG-file parsing code to read in the whole file and handle parsing it in memory rather than go seeking in it on the disk. I separated the changes needed for the dynamic string content generation in the fallback detection from my WAG-file parsing code and submitted the former's changes as a patch. Woot! My first code patch to ScummVM :)

2007-06-11 (Monday) - Changes to the first patch and cleaning WAG-parsing

During the weekend Fingolfin had given feedback to my first code patch in the tracker. And his second alternative approach was clearly better so I took it, made some fixes to it and submitted that to the tracker.

I also took my WAG-file parsing code and simplified and cleaned it. I took some code out to make the code more maintainable (Things like allowing to read only the header of a property and afterwards also its data or skipping that data altogether if we know we don't need that property's data). At least in this case I think it was better to not have them there, rather have more maintainable code than some little added performance boost or less memory usage in this particular non-critical area.

Oh, and I also came to notice that I had somehow managed to get non-normalized line endings in some of the source code files in my local ScummVM copy. Probably something to do with using diff and patch, applying Fingolfin's version of the fallback detection patch to my own local copy etc (It had 0x0A (LF) as the line ending, my local source code files had 0x0D & 0x0A (CR & LF)). Oh, the joys of choice between CR, LF, CR & LF etc :P

2007-06-12 (Tuesday) - Got first patch accepted to the trunk and submitted second patch (WAG file parsing)

Okay, so today I got my first patch with additional changes by Fingolfin & Sev accepted to the trunk. Yay!

I also submitted my second code patch that deals with WAG file parsing. Here's its description:

"Here's a patch that makes use of WinAGI's (http://www.winagi.com/) *.wag file format in AGI games' fallback detection. WAG-files may include information like game ID, game description, used AGI interpreter version, game's last edit date etc. This patch makes the AGI fallback detector use those information, if present."

After this I started looking into AGI256 & AGI256-2 related stuff because that's what's next!

2007-06-13 (Wednesday) - Started looking into AGI256

Read some AGI specifications on the ScummVM wiki. Read some of the ScummVM's AGI engine code. Now I know that in the ScummVM's AGI engine the priorities ("Sort of a Z-buffer") are saved in the same buffer as the picture data (Each pixel's lower 4 bits give the picture data and upper 4 bits give the priority data). So that'll make it a bit more of an effort to support 256 color images in the AGI engine.

Also found that Ctrl-D brings up the debug console and that first 16 colors are for the EGA/Amigaish-palette and the next 16 colors are for the console's transparency (So you can still see the underlying game with the console window on top). We'll see what's to be done with those console transparency colors when we need to use the whole 256 colors for the images' palette. Maybe map them through a table lookup to the static AGI256 256 color palette?

Looked at the AGI 256 pictures' static palette with GIMP. There's a pattern in it. Here's my current theory on the subject:

  • AGI256 pictures' palette's structure:
    • First 16 colors are the default EGA palette.
    • Next 16 colors are greyscale colors from black to white.
    • Next 72 colors are probably a HSL/HSI (Or something like that) color sweep with full saturation and brightness.
    • Then the same color sweep as before but with less saturation and/or brightness.
    • And again the same color sweep as before but with even less saturation and/or brightness.
    • Last 8 colors are greyscale colors from low intensity grey to almost black.

Also looked at differences in AGI.EXE between the original Sierra On-Line's AGI interpreter version 2.936 and the hacked AGI256 AGI.EXE. Used HT editor for that. Didn't learn much with that approach though. But then I took Interactive Disassembler Freeware v4.3 and started looking at AGI256's AGIGRAF.OVL file.


Using IDA I got some info out of the AGIGRAF.OVL. Commented some of the functions in it. But without understanding what the functions are that are called from outside I can't understand it fully (AGIGRAF.OVL is like a DOS age DLL so it references functions that aren't in AGIGRAF.OVL but should be in memory when it's loaded into memory).

  • Some guesses for the function names from AGI256's AGIGRAF.OVL (*HIGHLY* preliminary and subject to change):
    • setVideoMode (320x200x256c)
    • setTextMode (40x25x16c)
    • showAgi256Pic?
    • calcHeightLUT
      • Calculates table of y*320 values in range 0 <= y < 200
    • setPalette?
    • readNextAgi256Pic?
    • readAgi256Pic?
    • setClrCurrPixel
    • setWhiteMenuBar

2007-06-14 (Thursday) - Taking a look at the AGI256 hacked interpreter

Started to convert ScummVM's AGI engine to a 256 color version so that the color screen and priority screen would be separated into totally different buffers (At the moment they are married/merged together so that each pixel in the 160x168 AGI screen buffer contains 4 bits of color data and 4 bits of priority data). Doing the conversion in this way would require changes in many places in the AGI engine... so Sev hinted that it would be good first to take a look at the hacked AGI256 AGI interpreter with IDA because whoever did that hack highly probably didn't just rewrite half of the engine :-).

So started to look into AGI256 hacked interpreter files. Also found Nick Sonneveld's commented disassemblies for various AGI versions at http://www.agidev.com/projects/nagi/dev.php and they've been helpful.

2007-06-15 (Friday) - Disassembling and reading specifications

Looked more into AGI256's hacked files and read AGI specifications etc.

Commented almost all the differences between the original AGI 2.936's AGI.EXE and the hacked AGI256's AGI.EXE.

2007-06-18 (Monday) - Reverse engineering AGI256

Got more into working with IDA. Using info from Sonneveld's IDBs for various AGI.EXE versions I could make out where in the memory the "DLL"-files are loaded (AGIDATA.OVL, AGIGRAF.OVL, AGIOBJS.OVL). So I made a flat AGI.EXE that has them included in the correct positions. It helps with IDA debugging because IDA can now see all the functions and give cross references between them etc.

So after making the flattened AGI.EXE for the AGI256 hack inspection I read more of the Sonneveld's IDBs, commented and tried to understand parts of the flattened AGI.EXE, made some structs in IDA, fiddled with IDA's segments etc.

Figured out some functions like the agi256ReadPic -function and also a weird looking function that did something with the palette... as a matter of fact it turned out to be a synchronized palette blinking effect that's called from the screen shaking routine (Command number 110: cmd_shake_screen).

Learned a few things today... like that call pushes the location of the next instruction after it (In retrospect that's actually very rational) rather than the location of the call instruction itself. There was some interesting "call $+3 followed by a pop to get the IP" -usage in the agi256ReadPic routine and that's how I came to ponder the call instruction's true workings. HelpPC helped.

It looks like some call is jumping in the middle of a "shr al, 1" instruction. I'll see about that tomorrow...

2007-06-19 (Tuesday) - Got prototypes for AGI256 and AGI256-2 working

The jump instruction that was pointing in the middle of a "shr al, 1" instruction (I talked about that in yesterday's post) was part of some obsolete Hercules graphics mode code. So it was never used in AGI256's or AGI256-2's code.

Reverse engineered some more of the AGI256. Tried a prototype in ScummVM based on a theory about how AGI256 works. Didn't work straight away... some things were off. So took another look at the blitting function in AGIOBJS.OVL as the blitting function was one of the points were I wanted/needed more information. Finally at some point it worked! AGI256 prototype support for ScummVM is here :-).

Encouraged or just on a plain roll I looked at the AGIOBJS.OVL differences in the blitting function between AGI256 and AGI256-2. There wasn't much difference in them. Just that the AGI256-2 didn't use mirroring or run length encoding for its views (That info I had already got from AGI256-2's readme, though) and little else (How it wrote the pixels into memory for one). Tried another prototype for supporting AGI256-2 and other some fiddling and coding, it now works too.

There's some discrepancy in AGI256-2's intro (The background area surrounding the AGI256-logo, the color bar and the authors text isn't all black, it's partially grey). But I get something very similar when I run the AGI256-2's hacked AGI.EXE from command line in full screen mode under Windows 2000 (Although as I tried it just now, it doesn't always do that). Running the AGI256-2 demo just by clicking on the AGI256-2's hacked AGI.EXE in Explorer works correctly. So I'm not sure what's causing it exactly. Gotta look into it...

2007-06-20 (Wednesday) - My first commits to ScummVM's trunk, yay!

Changed the AGI256 and AGI256-2 prototypes into something that I could honestly put into the trunk :-). Did my first commit to the ScummVM's trunk today! Yay! But the log message didn't get there... "svn ci" did spring up a window to me and I wrote the log message into it but it didn't go anywhere. Well, live and learn :), for the next commit I wrote the log message into a file before calling "svn ci" and it worked just fine.

This was the log message that was supposed go into my first commit:

  • Add setting of 256 color palette for AGI256 and AGI256-2 games. Uses parts of patch #1728713.

Cut AGI256 and AGI256-2 support commits into smaller pieces and committed those. So now my first real feature additions to ScummVM's AGI engine are in the trunk. I'm thrilled that it's so :)

2007-06-21 (Thursday) - Thinking about what to do next and leaving for Midsummer festivities

Didn't do very much today, looked at the bug tracker to see if there were any AGI related bugs listed. Talked about the Gold Rush being incompletable bug on #scummvm, thinked about whether AGIPAL256 (Similar to AGIPAL but supporting 256 colors) support would be a nice addition to ScummVM etc. Updated my wiki front page a bit. Left for Midsummer festivities during the afternoon.

2007-06-25 (Monday) - Some bug fixing and removing obsolete code

Cleaned up obsolete console color code from AGI engine. Almost completely fixed priority screen showing in AGI256 and AGI256-2 mode (Only the ego's priority showing is still missing). Committed a game specific workaround for bug #1737343 ("GOLDRUSH: no intro after trivia").

Tested game saving and restoring with AGI256 and AGI256-2 games. I think the code probably is broken at the moment (But it should be broken only for AGI256 and AGI256-2 games). I tried AGI256-demo, AGI256-2-demo and Dashiki game's 256 color demo and they worked with saving and restoring. Although maybe they worked just because you can only save and restore in them in a single room... I'll look into this.

As a sidenote, pressing F12 breaks from ScummVM into the Visual C++ 2005 Express Edition's debugger. I didn't know that before :). So now I know. And the AGI engine in ScummVM uses F12 for switching between showing the priority screen and the color screen. So it felt very odd when I tried out the priority screen showing code and pressed F12 and all of a sudden it just breaked into some SDL_delay -routine. Weird, really... but not so weird anymore... so it's MSVC's feature, not a bug in ScummVM :).

2007-06-26 (Tuesday) - Some bug fixing and AGI256 hack documenting

Fixed saving & restoring with AGI256 and AGI256-2 games.

Went through the differences of AGI256's AGI.EXE and the Sierra's original v2.936 AGI.EXE and documented almost all the changes more thoroughly (Useful for making some public documentation of the hack later).

Debugged the fanmade AGI game Hobbits, looked at its logic in AGI studio. Played it with NAGI and tried to play it under Windows 2000's command prompt and DosBox 0.70 but AGI didn't like them somehow and gave me a prompt telling that there's not enough memory. With NAGI I got the whole intro and could also get to the starting room and play. With ScummVM some sprites and text were missing from the intro and I could get to the starting room by pressing F10 but the player character was missing and soon the intro restarted for some reason. There's really something bugging with this one :-). Didn't really make heads or tails of the why behind this yet.

Also tried the fanmade AGI game Space Trek (There's a bug listed for it in the ScummVM's bug tracker) and yes, the bug exists, I confirmed that, but that's about it.

2007-06-27 (Wednesday) - A bit more of AGI256 hack documenting

Didn't do much today... probably going to catch up a bit by doing some work on saturday. Looked at AGI256 hack's blitting function (One of the last functions I hadn't documented yet) and documented some AGI flags related functions that were used in the blitting function.

2007-06-28 (Thursday) - Reverse engineered AGI256's and AGI256-2's blitCel-function to a C subroutine

Okay... so agi256BlitCel-function was the last function in AGIOBJS.OVL that I hadn't already reverse engineered into a C subroutine. And I have to say... woah, reverse engineering agi256BlitCel-function took time. Like, many, hours. But it was worth it, now I can say that I've almost 100% reverse engineered AGI256 and AGI256-2 hacks... there's one little bit of data near AGI.EXE's start (Offsets 0x265 - 0x277 in the EXE-file) that are still a mystery to me. I tried putting zeroes in their place and it still ran so it may be that they aren't needed. Also I don't really know what's the usage (If any) of the relative call (db 0xE8 0x49 0x00) at 0x262 - 0x264 in AGI256's and AGI256-2's AGI.EXE.

2007-06-29 (Friday) - AGI monitor type variable (v26) stuff, CGA rendering info etc

Looked into AGI CGA rendering (NAGI and ScummVM). Tried out CGA modes with NAGI, DosBox and ScummVM. Looked into the toggle.monitor-command for changing between different CGA modes. Added support for changing AGI monitor type variable (v26) based on the rendering mode. Had a little talk on #scummvm about the mysterious bytes in the AGI256 AGI.EXE's start (The bytes I mentioned in yesterday's diary entry). Fiddled a bit with AGI256 AGI.EXE's disassembly in IDA, added a couple of segments etc.

Oh and I happened to commit an enum with an extra comma in its declarations end... jvprat told me that GCC threw an error with it (MSVC8 didn't), so I went and corrected it. First time to break and fix the trunk :P

Also loaded Larry 1's walkthrough on Amiga as a video from Youtube. I thought there might be some menu usage to see more examples of what the Amiga style menus are like, but at least with a little of jumping around the video, I didn't find any.

2007-06-30 (Saturday) - Relaxation and some looking into Amiga style menus' colors

During the week I thought I might do some work on ScummVM today but mostly didn't. Slept much, went and had some thai food with a friend and after that we went to the Turku's Medieval Market. At the restaurant Teini there was some folk music band playing, lots of delay, drums, a flute, a saxophone etc. Nice. Drank a few beers and then went home. Later I Googled and found out that the nice sounding band was Tervakello.

At night did some looking into what the Amiga style menus are like. At a glance it would seem that there are two types of Amiga AGI games in respect to menu colors.

My current theory on colors in Amiga style menus:

  • A positive element (Usually left if there are two elements):
    • White text with a green (Unchosen) or a purple (Chosen, Type 1) or a light orange (Chosen, Type 2) background.
    • An example: Restart in a Restart/Cancel-dialog.
    • The chosen positive element's background color differs, examples:
      • In King's Quest I it's light orange (Type 1)
      • In King's Quest III it's purple (Type 2)
  • A negative element (Usually right if there are two elements):
    • White text with a red (Unchosen) or cyan (Chosen) background.
    • An example: Cancel in a Restart/Cancel-dialog.

(Correction to the above (Added on 2007-07-05): All chosen elements have black text color, not white).

Some elements aren't in color. Like the elements in the top dropdown menu. Or elements in the inventory. They're just white text on a black background (If chosen, vice versa if not). Maybe we should talk about Amiga style dialogs rather than menus to distinguish them from the top dropdown menu, inventory etc.

Oh well... it seems there can be colored stuff in the inventory too like the Cancel-button.

2007-07-02 (Monday) - A change of scenery

Took a bus from Turku to Pori (To my parents' place at the countryside. There are cows in the field next to our house :-)). I'm going to be here in the countryside for the better part of July (My parents have ADSL and a WLAN router so I can get to the net from here). Took my IBM Thinkpad T23 with me. I haven't had it for long, just bought it some weeks ago so I installed Visual C++ 2005 Express on it, got it to compile ScummVM and checked out branch-0-10-0 so I might commit the Gold Rush intro workaround to it too in addition to the trunk. Tomorrow I'm going to do some work too ;-)

2007-07-03 (Tuesday) - First workaround backport and Amiga style menus prove a little bit problematic

Backported the Gold Rush intro skipping bug's workaround to the 0.10.0 branch. Investigated ScummVM's AGI engine's menu system a bit. It's not without its difficulties though, as in Amiga AGI games in a selection box there is no concept of a currently chosen element unless you go and click on them with your mouse. In ScummVM's AGI engine there always is a chosen element in a selection box by default. It wouldn't be very intuitive e.g. if you had an orange button (Currently chosen) on the left and a red button on the right and you'd press right to change the selected button and the left button would change color to green and the right button would change color to cyan. How would you know which of the buttons is the currently chosen one and which is not if you didn't know about the color coding beforehand?

So I've got two ways to make the Amiga style menus happen:

  • Make it so that you have to click on things with your mouse (Or whatever emulates a mouse) because that's the way Amiga AGI games did it.
    • This would get around the problem of not knowing what button is selected based on the button's color as you'd have to go and click on the button you want to press.
    • This would also be more faithful to the Amiga AGI games as they did it this way (At least as far as I know).
    • This would change the usability of the ScummVM's AGI engine in Amiga mode because now you'd have to click on things to press them.
    • Probably a bit harder to implement than the latter approach.
  • Make somehow apparent which of the buttons is currently selected (E.g. draw a black border around the chosen button).
    • This also would get around the problem of not knowing what button is selected as you'd see it by the chosen button's obvious border coloring (Or whatever method would be used).
    • This wouldn't be completely faithful to the Amiga AGI games as they didn't have a currently chosen button as far as I know.
    • This wouldn't change the usability of the ScummVM's AGI engine from its current state.
    • Probably a bit easier to implement than the former approach.

2007-07-04 (Wednesday) - Investigating EGA & Amiga-ish palette & doing groundwork for implementing Amiga style menus

Took a look at the Amiga-ish palette (newPalette-array in engines/agi/graphics.cpp) and the normal EGA palette (egaPalette-array in engines/agi/graphics.cpp). Compared them a bit. Here's how they look:

 
EGA (Top) vs. Amiga-ish (Bottom) palette

Here's only the EGA palette on its own as a 8x2 image (Scaled up by a factor of 40 for easier visibility), so one can more easily compare the different shades of similar colors:

 
EGA palette (Top: Colors 0-7. Bottom: Colors 8-15)

And here's the Amiga-ish palette on its own:

 
Amiga-ish palette (Top: Colors 0-7. Bottom: Colors 8-15)

Pondered about the way to pass information to the drawButton-function in the AGI engine. Probably going to pass some struct to it that has info on what colors to use in which situation (e.g. use this color when a positive button is in focus, use this color when a negative button is unchosen etc).

Consulted Sev about which way to go about the Amiga style menus and yes, I'm going to implement them by a little non-authenticity by using a border around the currently chosen button. This has the positive aspect of not altering the usability of ScummVM from its current state.

2007-07-05 (Thursday) - Working on Amiga style menus implementation

Took screenshots of a couple of Amiga AGI games using WinUAE 1.4.2a. Worked on the Amiga style menus implementation. Probably going to try a bit different way at the implementation tomorrow.

Screenshots from King's Quest I and King's Quest III on Amiga showing different button colors (Screenshots taken with WinUAE 1.4.2a):

King's Quest I (Amiga) screenshots

 
King's Quest I (Amiga): Restart-dialog. No buttons are being pressed with the mouse.
 
King's Quest I (Amiga): Restart-dialog. Restart-button is being pressed with the mouse.
 
King's Quest I (Amiga): Restart-dialog. Cancel-button is being pressed with the mouse.

King's Quest III (Amiga) screenshots

 
King's Quest III (Amiga): Save-dialog. No buttons are being pressed with the mouse.
 
King's Quest III (Amiga): Save-dialog. OK-button is being pressed with the mouse.

2007-07-06 (Friday) - Amiga cursors and palette

ScummVM's AGI engine has a SCI-style black & white mouse cursor. I added an Amiga cursor for the Amiga rendering mode (Color values taken from some Amiga AGI game - I don't remember which - running on WinUAE 1.4.2a). Also took the Amiga-style busy mouse cursor (An hourglass) from Space Quest II running on WinUAE 1.4.2a and added its data to ScummVM. The busy mouse cursor is not used at the moment though. But its there, if someone likes to implement using it.

Clone2727 on #scummvm had made a page on ScummVM's wiki for showcasing different palettes used in ScummVM's AGI engine. It turned out my fiddlings with GIMP for the visualization of ScummVM's AGI engine's palettes didn't go to waste as the images I made (See my 2007-07-04 diary entry) found their way to that page.

Talked about Amiga palettes etc with Raziel_AOne on #scummvm. He told how he had modified King's Quest's - it was probably I or II - executable back in the day on Amiga in order to change King Graham's skin color from yellow to pink. The hack wasn't without its difficulties though, as some of trees etc turned pink too :-). Raziel just wanted to know if there was a way to modify ScummVM so King Graham's skin color in King's Quest I & II would be pink. Of course its possible but off the top of my head it may require some sprite specific modifications. Came to the conclusion that an engine-specific GUI-option for turning the skin color modification on would be good after talking about it with Raziel and Sev.

It turned out that different Amiga AGI games use a different palette. As it dawned on me that Raziel had sometime hex-edited a Sierra AGI executable on Amiga in order to change the palette I thought that that's gotta be the place where the palette is defined. So I asked enthusiastically if he could show me the position in the executable. Later he sent me an email with the info and also some of the different palettes from various Amiga AGI games. Amiga AGI game palettes, here I come :-).

2007-07-07 (Saturday) - Comparing menu borders and decoding Amiga cursor format

Compared different menu border styles for the Amiga-style menus with GIMP. Probably going to simply use a thick black border around the currently chosen button as its easy to code and in my opinion it looks sufficiently intuitive and ok.

Also looked at the cursor files that come with some of the Amiga AGI games (The files are named Busy and Pointer). Finally figured them out almost completely.

Amiga AGI games' cursor format

My current theory on the format is as follows (Based on the Busy and Pointer -files from the Amiga version of King's Quest III):

Cursor's bitmap data

  • Starts with four bytes of zero.
    • Don't know what these are for. Maybe flags?
    • Were zero in both Busy and Pointer -files.
  • 16-bit big endian word: Bitplane 0 of row 0
    • The most significant bit is graphically the leftmost one
    • The least significant bit is graphically the rightmost one
  • 16-bit big endian word: Bitplane 1 of row 0
  • 16-bit big endian word: Bitplane 0 of row 1
  • 16-bit big endian word: Bitplane 1 of row 1
  • ... and so on for all the rows 0-15

Cursor's palette

  • Again four bytes of zero.
    • Don't know what these are for. Maybe flags?
    • Were zero in Both Busy and Pointer -files.
  • Then the palette for four colors:
  • Palette entry for color 0:
    • 16-bit big endian word: ARGB-color with 4-bits per color component
      • Alpha is bits 12-15
        • Value of 0x0F means the color is totally transparent
      • Red is bits 8-11
      • Green is bits 4-7
      • Blue is bits 0-3
  • Likewise palette entries for colors 1, 2 and 3

That's it. So the files are 80 bytes long, the bitmap is 16x16 in size and uses 4 colors. Some of the zero bytes are still such that I'm not completely sure what they're there for. And I'm not 100% sure about the first palette entry if its really just that and not some other data but it does fit the theory nicely.

Here are images of the Busy and Pointer -files:

 
Busy -mouse cursor
 
Pointer -mouse cursor

2007-07-09 (Monday) - Amiga AGI game palette extracting

Today I made a command line tool for detecting and extracting Amiga AGI game palettes. You can make it print out a C-array of the 16-color 12-bit RGB palette if its found. Removes duplicate palettes too (Found in some file I tried).

Here's the format of the Amiga AGI games' palettes:

  • The palette consists of 16 colors.
  • Each color consists of red, green and blue components (In this order).
  • Each component is a 16-bit big endian word in range 0-15 (i.e. 4 bits).

The palette should be found in the game's executable file.

I use the following heuristic for detecting a possible palette from a file:

  • First color must be black i.e. R = G = B = 0
  • Last color must be white i.e. R = G = B = 0x0F
  • All components of all colors must be in range 0-15
  • No other black color must exist in the palette than the first color
    • Added to help weed out some false positives

2007-07-10 (Tuesday) - Added Amiga-style menus (i.e. colored options)

Added Amiga-style colored options (FR #657645) to the trunk.

Here are the differences (That I can think of at the moment) to the original Amiga AGI engine:

  • Buttons are a bit thinner than in the original Amiga AGI engine
  • Currently chosen button has a black border around it
    • There was no such thing in the original Amiga AGI engine
  • Pressed buttons changed color in the original Amiga AGI engine
    • Currently ScummVM's AGI engine doesn't use the pressed state although there is some support for it in the code

2007-07-11 (Wednesday) - Added Amiga AGI game palette extractor tool

Went to town (Pori) to buy some new clothes. Didn't do very much strictly work today. Mostly worked on the Python version of the Amiga AGI game palette extractor. I had made a C++ version of it but felt that it might be good to learn a language that would be easier to do things fast in. And as Python had come up in discussions with a good friend of mine, I thought, why not try it.

I started dabbling with Python a day or two ago. Just downloaded the Python Windows installer and the HTML-version of the documentation from python.org. Seems like a nice language. Laughed out loud at some of the Monty Python jokes in the examples :-). Like the list of strings ['cat', 'window', 'defenestrate'] in this example. Like what? Defenestrate? What's that? Have a look what Meyer-Webster has to say about defenestrate :-).

So I made a tool for extracting palettes from Amiga AGI games' executable files and added it to ScummVM's trunk. You can see the source code here. My first Python program, yay!

2007-07-12 (Thursday) - Did more work on the Amiga AGI palettes

Worked on the Amiga AGI game palette extractor tool. Added wildcard support and a preliminary test that speeded the program up like a gazillion times or so :-).

2007-07-13 (Friday) - Left for a short vacation in eastern Finland

Went to eastern Finland to the city of Kouvola with my parents and my older brother. The occasion was my older brother's godparents' son's graduation party. Worked a bit on the ride with my laptop. Did some additional tool hacking with Python to parse the data Raziel_AOne sent me about different Amiga AGI palettes. Also made a program to compare different palettes so I can easily see which ones are unique.

2007-07-14 (Saturday) - Some festivities and a trip back from eastern Finland

Celebrated my older brother's godparents' son's graduation and left back for the city of Pori. Did a bit of work on sorting out the different Amiga AGI palettes on the way back.

2007-07-15 (Sunday) - Sorted out the Amiga AGI palettes

Talked with Raziel_AOne, got original palette data from him. Compared all the palette data I have and found that there are only three unique palettes.

Added the different Amiga AGI palettes to ScummVM and modified palette handling in the AGI engine so it'll be easier to enable the support for those palettes later (Now the palette data just is there but isn't used yet).

The three generations of Amiga AGI palettes

From all the Amiga AGI games I and Raziel_AOne gathered palette data from I found only three unique palettes. Here's my current theory on them:

  • First generation Amiga AGI palette
    • Used with Amiga AGI versions 2.0xx - 2.1xx
    • Used with Amiga AGI games released in 1986-1987
      • Maybe also earlier game versions use this palette?
    • Examples of different AGI versions using this palette:
      • 2.082 (King's Quest I v1.0U 1986)
      • 2.082 (Space Quest I v1.2 1986)
      • 2.090 (King's Quest III v1.01 1986-11-08)
      • 2.107 (King's Quest II v2.0J 1987-01-29)
      • x.yyy (Black Cauldron v2.00 1987-06-14)
      • x.yyy (Larry I v1.05 1987-06-26)
  • Second generation Amiga AGI palette
    • Used with Amiga AGI versions 2.2xx
    • Used with Amiga AGI games released in 1988
    • Examples of different AGI versions using this palette:
      • 2.202 (Space Quest II v2.0F. Intro says 1988. ScummVM 0.10.0 detects as 1986-12-09)
  • Third generation Amiga AGI palette
    • Used with Amiga AGI versions 2.3xx
    • Used with Amiga AGI games released in 1989
    • Examples of different AGI versions using this palette:
      • 2.310 (Police Quest I v2.0B 1989-02-22)
      • 2.316 (Gold Rush! v2.05 1989-03-09)
      • x.yyy (Manhunter I v1.06 1989-03-18)
      • 2.333 (Manhunter II v3.06 1989-08-17)
      • 2.333 (King's Quest III v2.15 1989-11-15)

Palette data comparison (12-bit RGB data): (From color 0 to 15 from top to bottom, from first to third generation from left to right)

  • 0x000, 0x000, 0x000 (No difference)
  • 0x00F, 0x00F, 0x00B (Some difference)
  • 0x080, 0x080, 0x0B0 (Some difference)
  • 0x0DB, 0x0DB, 0x0BB (Some difference)
  • 0xC00, 0xC00, 0xB00 (Some difference)
  • 0xB7D, 0xB7D, 0xB0B (Major difference)
  • 0x850, 0x850, 0xC70 (Some difference)
  • 0xBBB, 0xBBB, 0xBBB (No difference)
  • 0x777, 0x777, 0x777 (No difference)
  • 0x0BF, 0x0BF, 0x00F (Major difference)
  • 0x0E0, 0x0E0, 0x0F0 (Some difference)
  • 0x0FD, 0x0FD, 0x0FF (Some difference)
  • 0xF98, 0xF98, 0xF00 (Major difference)
  • 0xF70, 0xD0F, 0xF0F (Major difference)
  • 0xEE0, 0xEE0, 0xFF0 (Some difference)
  • 0xFFF, 0xFFF, 0xFFF (No difference)

2007-07-16 (Monday) - Worked on the online AGI256 and AGI256-2 documentation

Added information about AGI256 and AGI256-2 to the AGI Specifications page. The info is in the Fan-Made Extensions section. I'm quite pleased with the general descriptions but not so much with the implementation details subpages for AGI256 and AGI256-2. They're a bit of a mess at the moment to say it politely ;).

2007-07-17 (Tuesday) - Banged my head to the wall with bug #1751483

Tried to fix bug #1751483 (Description: "AGI: The -x command-line option appears to be broken").

Was somehow unfocused today, did only about a half a day's work. Didn't get far with the bugfixing as I banged my head to the wall with it for some hours. It just seemed that yes, the save_slot parameter does get correctly parsed from the command line and set to the configuration manager's key save_slot but doesn't for some unknown reason get to the AGI engine at all.

Sooo... it seems that it was just the way I used the command line options that made it act that way. I did use the --save-slot i.e. -x command line option but used the launcher with it to choose a game. Oh well, I did realize that after some hours :) and now I can at least reproduce the bug on my machine (By also giving the game's name on the command line, not just the save slot number).

The problem with my approach was that if no game was given on the command line the save_slot's value was cleared when loading a game. It got cleared as a part of the configuration manager's transient domain (kTransientDomain i.e. __TRANSIENT) that got cleared at game loading. So no wonder the value never got to the AGI engine's side at all :-).

And yeah, it's broken at the moment, the bug is true. With Police Quest I's PC version I also got the menus to disappear when loading some save game for it from the command line. And when I tried accessing the menu the game died. So it's definitely broken. But I haven't come up with a reasonably easy way to fix it yet and starting work on the Apple IIGS sound support is around the corner so I'll probably put this bug back to the pool.

2007-07-18 (Wednesday) - Started looking into Apple IIGS sound support

Searched the net for information on Apple IIGS sound. Read some. Filled in the mid-term student survey with quite a bit of comments.

2007-07-19 (Thursday) - Apple IIGS files

Wasn't very productive today. But at least found Ciderpress after several hours of searching.

Briefly tried the Apple IIGS version of King's Quest I. Went to the castle's front door, typed "open door" and pressed enter. A popup box springed up telling me the door opens and the door opened, but Graham just stood there and I couldn't move him anymore. So clearly the support's not perfect yet :-).

2007-07-20 (Friday) - A brief look into the current Apple IIGS sound implementation

Looked a bit into the current Apple IIGS sound implementation and read some more of the AGI specifications about the Apple IIGS sound.

2007-07-23 (Monday) - Starting looking into ScummVM's audio related code

Got back from a weekend visit to Turku. I hadn't redirected my snail mail so I went to Turku to check if I had received any mail (More like to check if I had got any bills that I needed to pay). But luckily there weren't many bills, only one credit card bill and it wasn't large. So came back to the countryside, here near Pori.

Started looking into ScummVM's audio related code so I'll know what classes to use for what needed functionality in the Apple IIGS sound implementation. The MIDI parsing related code looks promising... as it seems that the Apple IIGS AGI engine uses MIDI data. But I'll have to recheck that once I get to implementing it (Or a bit *before* that :-)).

2007-07-24 (Tuesday) - Looking at the current Apple IIGS sound implementation

Been feeling a bit weird today after dinner. Like my legs are a bit cold but some parts of my body are a bit warmer than usual. Maybe I'm getting sick or having a fever coming on... we'll see.

Took another look at the current Apple IIGS sound implementation in ScummVM. Loaded up some resource files (The *vol.* files) from Apple IIGS AGI games as raw 8 bit unsigned 8kHz sample data into Audacity and pressed play: MIAUUU! PRRRR! SQUEAAK! KRRRKRRRRKRRRRRRRRRR! "All aboard!" etc. Yeah, there's sample data in there alright :-).

2007-07-25 (Wednesday) - Dumping Apple IIGS sound files

Made ScummVM dump out the Apple IIGS MIDI and sample files and then converted the samples to .au-format using Python (It's got a library for outputting .au-files so it wasn't very hard). Here's a sound from Gold Rush: A man yelling "All aboard!".

Possibly going to mess with MESS to better understand how the sound works with Apple IIGS AGI games.

2007-07-26 (Thursday) - Some recreation

Took the day off and looked a bit at Sanitarium with IDA among other things. And had some snails and onion soup :).

BTW Sanitarium uses Smacker for videos (There's a DLL so it's not hard to spot :-)). And the game's main executable holds a nice collection of error and debug messages that help reverse engineering.

2007-07-27 (Friday) - Apple IIGS sample loading

Made routines for loading Apple IIGS AGI sample resources and making audio streams out of them. Took influence from the AIFF-loading routine from ScummVM's source code.

2007-07-28 (Saturday) - Decoding Apple IIGS sample header, Part 1

Modified a byte in an Apple IIGS AGI sample resource's header (At header offset 2) and tried the sample out by running the game using KEGS32 and MESS. So it turned out that that header byte handles playing pitch. And it's definitely exponential with 2**(1/12) as the base. The value seems to wrap around after 0x7F.

2007-07-29 (Sunday) - Decoding Apple IIGS sample header, Part 2

Inspected how the byte in Apple IIGS AGI sample resource's header offset 4 affects the playing of the sample. It is the volume control, probably logarithmic, but not 100% sure about that yet.

Fiddled a bit with some other header offsets and got something interesting and/or weird to happen but don't yet know what they really did :-).

The Apple IIGS AGI sample resource's header is 54 bytes long and by the header comparisons I've done the following header offsets are the most varying ones (Some other bytes also vary, but only between two values in the data I've compared):

  • Header offset 2
    • The playing pitch
  • Header offset 4
    • Volume control
  • Header offsets 8 and 9
    • Sample size in bytes (Little endian 16-bit word)
  • Header offset 44
    • Unknown function, uses values x*9 for x in {0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6}
  • Header offset 45
    • Unknown function, uses values 0, 2, 6
  • Header offset 50
    • Unknown function, uses values x*9 for x in {1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6}
  • Header offset 51
    • Unknown function, uses values 0, 1, 2, 7

2007-07-30 (Monday) - Locating Apple IIGS instruments and Atari ST and Apple IIGS palettes

Played with HT Editor to find out where the instrument data is in different Apple IIGS AGI games. Found out the offsets into the games' executables but haven't yet compared the instrument data between games to see how much of it is shared data.

Also looked into the SIERRASTANDARD-file that comes with Apple IIGS AGI games. It's a 65536 bytes long file containing raw unsigned 8-bit mono PCM-audio data used by the instruments. The file is identical between all the Apple IIGS AGI games I've tested, excluding Space Quest I (It has a couple of different sounds).

As I was going through the Apple IIGS AGI executables in search for the instrument data I also thought why not look for the palette data as well. Tried out a couple of possibilities and finally found the palette with the search key (0xBB, 0x0B). As I had looked up from Wikipedia that Apple IIGS used a 4096 (12-bit) palette it helped to narrow down the search possibilities. Bytes 0xBB, 0x0B define an AGI palette color 7, which is gray. So I looked through all the Apple IIGS game data I had for different palettes and compared them.

According to the data I have compared there are two different Apple IIGS AGI palettes. The first one is older and is only used in Space Quest I (AGI version 1.002) and it is identical to the oldest generation Amiga AGI palette. All other games (AGI versions 1.003 - 3.003) use a slightly different palette that's otherwise identical to the first one but has a different color 13. Older palette uses an orange 0xF70 (12-bit RGB) there but all others use a light purple 0xD9F.

Just for the kicks I also looked through Atari ST AGI executables for palette data. Wikipedia helped here again as it told me that the original Atari ST had a 64-color palette. So after some searching I found the palette data. Extracted palettes from all the Atari ST AGI executables I had access to and compared the data. I only found a single identical palette shared between all of the Atari ST AGI games. Here it is: 

/**
 * Atari ST AGI palette.
 * Used by all of the tested Atari ST AGI games.
 * 16 RGB colors. 3 bits per color component.
 */
static const byte atariStAgiPalette[16 * 3] = {
	0x0, 0x0, 0x0,
	0x0, 0x0, 0x7,
	0x0, 0x4, 0x0,
	0x0, 0x5, 0x4,
	0x5, 0x0, 0x0,
	0x5, 0x3, 0x6,
	0x4, 0x3, 0x0,
	0x5, 0x5, 0x5,
	0x3, 0x3, 0x2,
	0x0, 0x5, 0x7,
	0x0, 0x6, 0x0,
	0x0, 0x7, 0x6,
	0x7, 0x2, 0x3,
	0x7, 0x4, 0x7,
	0x7, 0x7, 0x4,
	0x7, 0x7, 0x7
};

2007-07-31 (Tuesday) - Comparing Apple IIGS instruments

Made a quick Python program for seeking out the instrument data from Apple IIGS AGI executables and comparing them. I used a part of the first instrument's starting data ('\x7f\x00\x0f\x78\x0a\x00\x78\x00\x00\x00\x14\x05') as the search string. Here's what I found out:

There are two partially different instrument sets. One is from the oldest test subject (Space Quest I using AGI 1.002) and the other is from the newer games using AGI 1.003 - AGI 3.003.

Space Quest I has 26 instruments (1192 bytes), all others have 28 instruments (1292 bytes). 16 of the instruments are shared between the two data sets so Space Quest I has 10 unique instruments. The unique instruments are 2, 4, 13, 14, 17, 18, 20, 21, 22, 23 (Zero-based numbering).

All instruments are 44 bytes in length excluding instruments 6, 7 and 8 of the newer instrument set (And instruments that are identical with them, of course). Instrument 6 of the newer instrument set is 80 bytes in length, instruments 7 and 8 are 56 bytes.

Here are the starting offsets for instrument data in the tested Apple IIGS AGI executables:

  • 0x80AD
    • SQ.SYS16 (Space Quest I, AGI 1.002)
  • 0x844E
    • LL.SYS16 (Leisure Suit Larry I, AGI 1.003)
  • 0x8469
    • DEMO.SYS16 (AGI Demo 2, AGI 1.005)
    • KQ.SYS16 (King's Quest I, AGI 1.006)
    • PQ.SYS16 (Police Quest I, AGI 1.007)
  • 0x84B7
    • KQ2.SYS16 (King's Quest II, AGI 1.013)
    • MG.SYS16 (Mixed-Up Mother Goose, AGI 1.013)
    • KQ3.SYS16 (King's Quest III, AGI 1.014)
  • 0x6563
    • SQ2.SYS16 (Space Quest II, AGI 1.014)
  • 0x8979
    • MH.SYS16 (Manhunter I, AGI 2.004)
    • KQ4.SYS16 (King's Quest IV, AGI 2.006)
    • BC.SYS16 (The Black Cauldron, AGI 3.001)
    • GR.SYS16 (Gold Rush, AGI 3.003)

BTW I also found out that by going 4 bytes backwards from the start of the instrument data you'll find a little endian 16-bit word giving the length of the whole instrument set (So it's 1192 with Space Quest I, 1292 with all the others).

2007-08-01 (Wednesday) - Instrument data, palette commits and Apple IIGS AGI debug mode triggers

Still played a bit with the Python program that handles the Apple IIGS instrument data extraction. Now I feel like I'm getting a bit of a hang of the instrument data.

Here's an odd bit of logic code I found from Apple IIGS version of King's Quest I (I added the comments): 

if (v20 == 0) // v20 is computer type, value 0 is IBM-PC
  set.game.id("PQ"); // Police Quest?!
else
  set.game.id("KQ");

Look at variables used by AGI for info on v20. Like what? Why? Why would the game want to change its game ID based on what computer it's being run on? Totally weird...

Also found some word triggers for Apple IIGS AGI debug modes:

  • Police Quest I
    • pqdbg
    • stink bug
  • King's Quest I
    • kqdbg
  • King's Quest II
    • kq2dbg
  • King's Quest III
    • kq3dbg
    • mice ass
  • Space Quest II
    • sq2dbg

Encountered CE in the games' version numbers (Example: "1.0K 11/22/88 CE") and wondered about what it meant. After looking through some of the messages in the logic resources I think CE probably means Carlos Escobar as he's credited as the maker of (At least some - if not all - of) the Apple IIGS AGI versions.

Committed the Apple IIGS and Atari ST palettes to the trunk (Here's the diff).

2007-08-02 (Thursday) - Trying to figure out Apple IIGS sample header

Tried to figure out what the unknown bytes in the Apple IIGS AGI sample resource's header do. Finally figured out bytes at header offsets 44, 45, 50 and 51. According to my current theory bytes 45 and 51 contain channel info and playing mode and bytes 44 and 50 control played wave length. They're all encoded in the same fashion as the same info in Apple IIGS instruments (More info here).

Committed the Apple IIGS AGI sample loading code to the trunk (/scummvm/trunk/engines/agi/sound.cpp: diff to r28404 and r28405)

2007-08-03 (Friday) - Figured out most of the missing parts of the Apple IIGS sample header

Finally figured out most of the missing parts of the Apple IIGS sample header (A not-so-pretty diff. Look at struct IIgsSampleHeader). I had pondered whether there was some kind of an envelope in the header... and there is! It's actually identical to a part of the Apple IIGS instrument header. Making that connection was the key. Looking at the sample headers' histogram in Open Office also helped (I had made a Python program for gathering the data and outputting it as comma separated values to a text file. Open Office can import those .CSV-files so it's easy to read the data in).

Also as a side thing I extracted the Apple IIGS AGI arrow cursor data from a screenshot and committed it to the trunk (Diff).

Here's what the Apple IIGS AGI arrow cursor looks like on a blue background:

 
Apple IIGS AGI arrow cursor

On a different note I watched Assembly 2007's Oldskool Demo competition online during the night. Vic-20, Atari 2600 and NES demos, whee :-). The NES demo had nice speech effects for the credits.

If you're interested be sure to check out the 64kB intro compo and the main demo compo today using Assembly TV.

2007-08-04 (Saturday) - A couple of compilation fixes

Carch on #scummvm told of a couple of compilation problems that ScummVM's current trunk has on on Windows (VS2003), Xbox (VS2003) and Xbox 360 (VS2005). We investigated the problems together and I committed the fixes to the trunk (Here and here).

In Kyra's code an object wasn't converted automatically to a boolean value even though it had an operator bool defined so I added an explicit bool conversion and that fixed the problem.

In the AGI code there was a problem with automatic selection of the wanted version of the pow-function. So I replaced the offending pow-function call with a constant value as it actually was calculating a constant and not a variable and it worked. Carch also gave another way to fix the problem and that was to replace the pow(2, 1/12.0) call with a pow(2.0, 1/12.0) call. That way the compiler knew to choose the pow(double, double) version of the pow-function.

2007-08-06 (Monday) - Mostly a holiday

Didn't sleep much last night (About 3,5h or so) and my sister came to visit with her children. Played with my niece, took an evening nap, ate, watched Michio Kaku's Time-documentary's 4th part and also Simpsons etc. So this was mostly a holiday.

2007-08-07 (Tuesday) - Working on Apple IIGS instrument loading

Worked on Apple IIGS instrument loading code for ScummVM.

2007-08-08 (Wednesday) - Some more work on the Apple IIGS instrument loading

Worked some more on the Apple IIGS instrument and wave file loading code (Here's today's tiny commit).

2007-08-09 (Thursday) - Committed Apple IIGS instrument and wave file loading code

Committed the Apple IIGS instrument and wave file loading code to the trunk.

Diffs:

Also learned that the command line tool svn doesn't convert "\n" to a newline (I gave a commit log with the -m parameter to the svn-tool with a "\n" in it. It didn't convert it at all but just copied it as it is to the commit log).

2007-08-10 (Friday) - True sample size calculation and taking variables apart

Worked on fixing the Apple IIGS samples' sizes as they can be smaller in reality than what's saved in the sample headers. It can be so because a zero in the sample data stream will end the sample prematurely (That's something the Apple IIGS's sound chip Ensoniq ES5503 DOC did).

Also decided to be more free with how I save data in the memory, that is I decided to take apart some bit field variables read from files and save them in the memory as multiple variables etc. So the data should now be easier to use.

2007-08-13 (Monday) - Restructured some of the Apple IIGS sound code etc

Restructured some of the Apple IIGS sound code (Put functions inside structs etc). Realized when talking with Sev that the code submission and evaluation deadline is next monday, on the 20th. That hadn't really sunk in yet in my mind so this means this week's going to include lots of ScummVM hacking :).

2007-08-14 (Tuesday) - General Apple IIGS sound hacking #1

Worked on the Apple IIGS sound code.

2007-08-15 (Wednesday) - General Apple IIGS sound hacking #2

More work on the Apple IIGS sound code.

2007-08-16 (Thursday) - Inspecting Apple IIGS MIDI sound resources

Played around with the Apple IIGS AGI midi sound resources. Yep, they're standard MIDI files with a 16-bit little endian 0x0002 header. Sometimes they start with 0xFC (Stop sequence) right after the header with no encoded delta-time before the command. And sometimes they end by simply exhausting the midi stream's length and not giving a 0xFC (Although it might be just that I'm not parsing the files 100% correctly yet and that's what's making it happen). Also some of the midi streams seem to have additional data after the first encountered 0xFC. I looked at the additional trailing data from some of the files and at a first glance it seems they're full of commands for centering the pitch wheel on different channels, setting some default values for different controllers or something like that. Here are some statistics about the Apple IIGS AGI midi sound resources I tested:

  • Used commands in the Apple IIGS AGI midi resources (Approximate counts):
    • 0x80: 00064488 "Note off" (Varying parameters)
    • 0x90: 00065516 "Note on" (Varying parameters)
    • 0xB0: 00006252 "Controller" (Varying parameters)
    • 0xC0: 00001574 "Program Change" (Varying parameters)
    • 0xE0: 00000146 "Pitch Wheel" (Only used with parameter 0x2000 i.e. wheel center)
    • 0xFC: 00000271 "Stop sequence" (No parameters for this, ends the stream)

(Update on 2007-08-30: The numbers given above aren't totally correct as I parsed delta-time as a variable length quantity - rather than a single byte as it seems to be in these files - when I generated these statistics).

2007-08-17 (Friday) - First Apple IIGS sample playing!

Got an experimental and not-pretty sound mixing code to run and heard the first Apple IIGS sample playing at a near reasonable pitch too :-). Whee! Getting something concrete done raises the spirit! Had some red wine and blue cheese for celebration :-).

2007-08-18 (Saturday) - More Apple IIGS sound hacking

It seems samples aren't looped if a zero in the sample is encountered. So even if the mode for the sample is set to looping but a zero is encountered in the sample data the sample will not loop, it will just end.

Whee! Seems like I got most of the samples to play at a correct pitch now!

BTW as a random thought King's Quest III's Apple IIGS version doesn't have speed settings (slow/normal/fast/fastest) at all, so it can be a pain to play it using ScummVM. Might have to force some speed settings to the menus...

Played around with the envelopes and as I found out after little testing that the relative pitch and envelope increment values are 16-bit little endian values, not 16-bit big endian as I had assumed before, the enveloping started to sound more authentic like.

2007-08-19 (Sunday) - Some more Apple IIGS MIDI hacking

Broken MIDI files

Seems like King's Quest II's starting song (Greensleeves, sound resource 0) isn't parsed right. Here's its start: 

00000000          02 -- 02 00 means that it's an Apple IIGS midi sequence
00000001 00 00 c0 16 -- Then some program changes (command 0xC?)
00000005 00 c8 20 00 -- ...
00000009 c2 14 00 c3 -- ...
0000000d 22 00 c4 22 -- ...
00000011 00 c5 22 00 -- ...
00000015 c6 2a 00 c7 -- ...
00000019 26 00 c1 14 -- ...
0000001d 01 b0 07 69 -- Delta-time 01: controller 7, chan 0, val 0x69
00000021 00 b8 07 76 -- Delta-time 00: controller 7, chan 8, val 0x76
00000025 00 b2 07 6d -- Delta-time 00: controller 7, chan 2, val 0x6d
00000029 00 b3 07 7c -- Delta-time 00: controller 7, chan 3, val 0x7c
0000002d 00 b4 07 7c -- Delta-time 00: controller 7, chan 4, val 0x7c
00000031 00 b5 07 7c -- Delta-time 00: controller 7, chan 5, val 0x7c
00000035 00 b6 07 76 -- Delta-time 00: controller 7, chan 6, val 0x76
00000039 00 b7 07 76 -- Delta-time 00: controller 7, chan 7, val 0x76
0000003d 00 b1 07 6a -- Delta-time 00: controller 7, chan 1, val 0x6a
00000041 85 90 40 26 -- BUT HERE IT BREAKS DOWN at 0x41 with byte 0x85
00000045 00 93 4c 26 -- Here are really note on commands (Parsed as controller commands)!

So at 0x41 with byte 0x85 it's taken as a first byte of a variable length quantity (Delta-time here) that's more than one byte long because the value is over 0x80! After that the data is parsed as controller commands which it really isn't, it's note on and note off commands. Why is this this way? What to do? Some bandaid fixing maybe?-) We'll see...

More breakage:

King's Quest IV's MIDI sound resource 14: 

00000021 00 b7 07 5a
00000025 d3 96 56 47 -- Here at 0x25 with 0xd3 again the same kind of breakage
00000029 00 97 4a 47

King's Quest IV's MIDI sound resource 39: 

0000001a 00 b5 07 63
0000001e 99 95 40 1d  -- Here at 0x1e with 0x99 again the same kind of breakage
00000022 11 93 40 44

King's Quest IV's MIDI sound resource 46: 

0000003d 00 b8 07 73
00000041 ea 97 43 7c -- Here at 0x41 with 0xea again the same kind of breakage
00000045 00 98 43 7c

King's Quest IV's MIDI sound resource 105: 

0000001a 00 b7 07 71
0000001e ec 94 3e 23 -- Here at 0x1e with 0xec again the same kind of breakage
00000022 00 95 4a 23

King's Quest IV's MIDI sound resource 109: 

00000017 00 b3 07 78
0000001b 93 93 31 4e -- Here at 0x1b with 0x93 again the same kind of breakage
0000001f 02 91 59 52

King's Quest IV's MIDI sound resource 207: 

0000001a 00 b5 00 78
0000001e 8a 95 3e 54 -- Here at 0x1e with 0x8a again the same kind of breakage
00000022 03 40 41 05

Mixed-Up Mother Goose's MIDI sound resource 7: 

0000003d 00 b8 07 73
00000041 95 92 43 6f -- Here at 0x41 with 0x95 again the same kind of breakage
00000045 00 95 4f 66

Mixed-Up Mother Goose's MIDI sound resource 37: 

0000003d 00 b8 07 72
00000041 96 92 47 76 -- Here at 0x41 with 0x96 again the same kind of breakage
00000045 00 95 53 73

Possible explanation for the broken MIDI files

It might just be that Apple IIGS AGI MIDI files don't use a variable length quantity for the delta-time but always use a single byte delta-time which *can* be >= 0x80! Investigating... (If this is so then it's a non-standard behaviour for a MIDI file)

Update! Okay, so it seems these MIDI files don't use variable length quantities for delta-time. Delta-time is always one single byte even if it might be >= 0x80. But! That delta-time byte also acts as a shorthand for commands like 0xFC (Stop sequence) or 0xF8 (Timer sync).

So let's read a single byte from the stream. If it's 0xFC it stops the sequence right there. If it's 0xF8 we can probably just jump over it as we probably don't need it. Otherwise you use the byte's value as a delta-time and then you read the command byte, parameters etc normally (Running status is also used). At least this is my current theory based on experiments with a Python program I wrote for parsing these MIDI files.

I checked some files and yes it really does seem we do need to check for end of sequence (0xFC) before reading the delta-time as some files do use 0xFC where the delta-time would be.

I'm going bughunting... be vevy vevy quiet!

I wasn't planning on going bughunting but as I tried to submit my MIDI parsing/stepping-through code into SVN I found out that sound didn't work with AGI in the SVN. Possibly Fingolfin inadvertently broke it with the OOficiation/clean-up -commits to the AGI's sound code or made the bug somehow come up more easily (At least AFAIK it didn't crash like that before ;-)). Well, in the wee hours I disgruntently tried to fix the bug and at last I succeeded (Here's the diff for the fix. The crash was happening because the PCjr sound mixing code tried to use uninitialized values (e.g. phase, ins) when mixSound was called before anything was playing). Come to think of it I'm not really sure how it has been able to *not* crash before :).

After fixing the crashing bug I got to the point where I could commit the MIDI parsing/stepping-through code into the SVN. Whee, it's not perfect (Speed's probably off), it doesn't use the MIDI classes yet etc, but it steps through the MIDI files (That aren't totally standard) hopefully quite correctly :).

2007-08-20 (Monday) - Juryrigged Apple IIGS MIDI output for first sound testing!

Juryrigged the Apple IIGS MIDI parsing code to fill the sound buffer with a sine wave when encountering a Note On -command in the MIDI stream (Using the Note On -command's note frequency data to adjust the sine wave's frequency too). What sounds I got :-) heh, but at least I recognized the Greensleeves -theme from King's Quest II's intro ;).

Hopefully the wiki's upload file functionality will be working again in the near future so I could upload a sample of the buzzes I saved from the testings :).

Later today I thought about the mixing stuff and I'm thinking it quite probable that we'll hear some real samples soon! (Not possibly the correct samples yet because the Program Change -command's parameter isn't deciphered yet so I'm not certain what instrument should go where).

2007-08-21 (Tuesday) - Oscillator mode comparison etc

Compared the used oscillator modes in the Apple IIGS AGI games from both the instruments and samples:

I found these used combinations of modes:

  • Both waves (A and B) in an oscillator use the same mode:
    • Oneshot (Used very much by samples and by a few instruments (Probably drums, I presume))
    • Loop (Used quite much by samples, very much by instruments)
    • Loop + Halt (The only thing using this is the unique instrument that has four oscillators)
    • Swap (The only thing using this is the unique instrument that has four oscillators)
  • Waves A and B in an oscillator use different modes:
    • Oneshot / Loop + Halt (Used quite much by samples and by a few instruments)
    • Loop / Loop + Halt (The only thing using this is Police Quest I's sample 12)
    • Swap / Swap + Halt (The only thing using this is Gold Rush's sample 60)

This means I can ignore the Sync (Amplitude Modulation) oscillator mode for now as it's not used by at least the Apple IIGS AGI games I tested. And ignoring the Swap oscillator mode isn't going to hurt much *if* the one unique instrument that has four oscillators isn't used much (I don't know how much it's used yet though, so there's still a bit of a risk). Oh, and I do presume the Gold Rush's sample 60 isn't used very widely :-) (It's a sound of a horse's hoof hitting pavement).

2007-08-22 (Wednesday) - My birthday!

This is my birthday! Yay! Spent most of the day with my family, played with my niece (We were a bunny family and we were scared of the wolves around our house so we called the police who came and locked the wolves into prison and shot the ones that tried to run away :-)), had some coffee and cake, went to sauna and watched Zorba The Greek during the late evening.

Oh and I discovered/realized that at least Apple IIGS King's Quest I's volume files are not encrypted. So I can just go and write new MIDI codes straight into the files and run the game through an emulator to try to hear what program change corresponds to what instrument. Whee :-) This is good.

2007-08-23 (Thursday) - Investigating MIDI controller commands and instruments

Used Python to write test MIDI data into Apple IIGS King's Quest I's disk image (Straight onto the MIDI sound resource number 0 i.e. the intro song) and ran it through MESS and KEGS32. It seems you can use just about any controller on a channel and all it does is change its volume :-). So controller 0, 7, 64, whatever, they seem to be only for changing volume (Haven't done extensive testing yet, so it is possible they may act differently in some situations).

Wrote some test MIDI data to see what the program changes do. They seem to change the instrument played on a channel, that's for sure, but I'm not yet sure of the mapping between the program change parameter and the instrument number.

Also tried varying the velocity of note on and note off commands (Used program 36 on channel 0). It didn't do jack :). But! As the velocity information *is* there, it might be used even if Apple IIGS AGI didn't use it (There's of course the possibility that the emulators just mess it up somehow, but MESS should be quite good, eh?-)). So we might even hear more articulate versions of the songs using ScummVM if we'll use the velocity info! We shall see...

2007-08-28 (Tuesday) - Reverse engineering the program change to instrument mapping

Been trying to reverse engineer the Apple IIGS AGI MIDI files' program change command's parameter value to instrument number mapping recently. Tried a few approaches that didn't work but came up with a way that works quite well. Here's the preliminary mapping from program numbers to instrument numbers (Instrument number 6 seems to be mostly used to mean an "undefined instrument" or a "not used instrument"):

Preliminary MIDI program change to Apple IIGS AGI instrument mapping

Programs 0-9:

  • Instruments: 21, 22, 24, 25, 23, 26, 6, 6, 6, 6

Programs 10-19:

  • Instruments: 7, 9, 12, 8, 13, 11, 17, 10, 6, 6

Programs 20-29:

  • Instruments: 19, 18, 20, 14, 16, 6, 6, 6, 6, 6

Programs 30-39:

  • Instruments: 0, 1, 2, 4, 3, 5, 17, 2, 2, 2
    • The trailing 2's are probably somehow modified so they don't sound identical

Programs 40-49:

  • Instruments: 27, 15, 15, 27, 6, 6, 6, 6, 6, 6

I'd venture that the used instruments in different base 10 parts (First ten programs, second ten programs etc) are different instrument categories (e.g. programs 20-29 are for drums). Haven't yet tested this but it would seem logical.

Oh and this preliminary mapping is for the newer Apple IIGS AGI instrument set (i.e. used by all other test subjects except Space Quest I).

2007-08-29 (Wednesday) - Program changes comparison etc

Here's some info about the Apple IIGS AGI MIDI files' program changes:

Older Apple IIGS AGI instrument set: (Space Quest I, AGI v1.002):

  • Used programs: [0, 1, 2, 4, 5, 10, 16, 20, 22, 32, 33, 36, 38, 39, 40]
  • Unused programs (Range 0-43): [3, 6, 7, 8, 9, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 17, 18, 19, 21, 23, 24, 25, 26, 27, 28, 29, 30, 31, 34, 35, 37, 41, 42, 43]

Newer Apple IIGS AGI instrument set: (All others together, AGI v1.003+):

  • Used programs: [0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 20, 21, 22, 23, 24, 29, 30, 31, 32, 33, 34, 35, 36, 38, 39, 40, 41, 42, 43]
  • Unused programs (Range 0-43): [6, 7, 8, 9, 17, 18, 19, 25, 26, 27, 28, 37]

Not using programs 6-9 and 18-19 makes sense because they use the instrument 6 that seems and sounds somewhat weird.

Not using programs 25-29 would make sense for the same reason but it seems program 29 is used... by only Manhunter I's MIDI sound resources 116 and 142! So it *might* be only a fluke but not necessarily so.

Programs 32 and 37-39 seem to use the same instrument but still sound different. Although program 37 seems not to be used at all there are still programs 32, 38 and 39 to look into. Maybe some additional tweaking somewhere else than in the instrument data?

Programs 40 and 43 use the same samples and probably the same instrument. Same goes for programs 41 and 42. Gotta investigate them more closely too...

As a sidenote program 17 seems ok but for some reason it seems not to be used at all. Maybe just not a particularly popular instrument?-)

2007-08-30 (Thursday) - SIERRASTANDARD investigation etc

The Apple IIGS AGI uses a file named SIERRASTANDARD that holds the sample data used by the instruments. It's 65536 bytes in size, it holds 8-bit unsigned sample data and all the different samples start on 256 byte boundaries. None of the SIERRASTANDARD files I've tested have zeroes in them (A zero would mark a premature end of a sample).

After some investigation (Looking at the file rawly imported into Audacity) etc here's some info on it (This info applies directly to the newer SIERRASTANDARD file used with Apple IIGS AGI v1.003+. There are some little differences in the older SIERRASTANDARD file that's used at least with Space Quest I (AGI v1.002)):

Samples in the newer SIERRASTANDARD file

  • Number of samples (Not all unique!):
    • 34
  • Sample redundancy (May be incomplete):
    • Samples 18 and 30 are identical (A base drum)
    • Samples 21 and 31 are identical (Sounds like a drum stick hit)
    • Samples 24 and 32 are identical (Sounds like hihat)
    • Samples 27 and 33 are identical (Sounds quite like a shaman drum)
  • "Dummy" samples
    • Sample 4 is full of byte 0x50 (i.e. about -0.38 if amplitude is normalized to range [-1, +1])
  • Unused samples (i.e. not used by the instrument data. May be incomplete):
    • None of the instruments in either the older or the newer instrument set use samples 29-33
      • This means we could theoretically ditch the last 16KiB of the SIERRASTANDARD file
    • None of the instruments in the older instrument set use samples 2-4
    • None of the instruments in the newer instrument set use sample 4
  • Sample sizes log2 (2**x will give the true sample size):
    • sampleSizesLog2 = [10, 10, 10, 9, 9, 10, 10, 10, 10, 10, 10, 11, 10, 10, 10, 10, 10, 10, 11, 10, 10, 11, 10, 10, 11, 10, 10, 11, 14, 13, 11, 11, 11, 11]
  • Sample sizes (This table can be calculated from the sample sizes log2):
    • sampleSizes = [1024, 1024, 1024, 512, 512, 1024, 1024, 1024, 1024, 1024, 1024, 2048, 1024, 1024, 1024, 1024, 1024, 1024, 2048, 1024, 1024, 2048, 1024, 1024, 2048, 1024, 1024, 2048, 16384, 8192, 2048, 2048, 2048, 2048]
      • Way to calculate this with Python: sampleSizes = map(lambda x: 2**x, sampleSizesLog2)
      • Note that sum(sampleSizes) should always be 65536 (The size of SIERRASTANDARD)
  • Sample positions (This table can be calculated from the sample sizes):
    • samplePos = [0, 1024, 2048, 3072, 3584, 4096, 5120, 6144, 7168, 8192, 9216, 10240, 12288, 13312, 14336, 15360, 16384, 17408, 18432, 20480, 21504, 22528, 24576, 25600, 26624, 28672, 29696, 30720, 32768, 49152, 57344, 59392, 61440, 63488]
      • Way to calculate this with Python: samplePos = [sum(sampleSizes[:end]) for end in xrange(len(sampleSizes))]

Differences between the older SIERRASTANDARD and the newer SIERRASTANDARD file

Here are all the differences between the older and the newer SIERRASTANDARD file:

  • Sample 2 (Offsets 2048-3071) differs between SIERRASTANDARD versions
    • Sample data
      • The older version of sample 2 starts with some real sample data but a bit over half of it is completely silent (i.e. centerline i.e. byte 0x80)
      • Newer version of sample 2 contains real sample data
    • Instrument usage
      • None of the instruments of the older instrument set use sample 2
      • Instruments 19 and 20 of the newer instrument set use sample 2
  • Sample 3 (Offsets 3072-3583) differs between SIERRASTANDARD versions
    • Sample data
      • The older version of sample 3 is full of byte 0x50
      • The newer version of sample 3 contains real sample data
    • Instrument usage
      • None of the instruments of the older instrument set use sample 3
      • Instrument 4 of the newer instrument set uses sample 3
  • Sample 17 (Offsets 17408-18431) differs between SIERRASTANDARD versions
    • Sample data
      • Both versions of SIERRASTANDARD use real sample data here
      • Newer version's sample has a higher pitch than the old version and the wave looks more triangle like
    • Instrument usage
      • Instruments 5 and 18 of the older instrument set uses this sample
      • Instrument 6 of the newer instrument set uses this sample
  • Sample 27 (Offsets 30720-32767) differs between SIERRASTANDARD versions
    • Sample data
      • The older version of sample 27 consists mostly of silence (Byte 0x80) followed by some 0x0F
      • The newer version uses real sample data here (Identical to the last sample i.e. sample 33)
    • Instrument usage
      • Instruments 5 and 23 of the older instrument set use this sample
      • Instruments 6 and 25 of the newer instrument set use this sample

2007-12-11 (Tuesday) - End of GSoC 2007 project diary

I thought I'd add a clarifying end note to my project diary. I'm not going to update the diary anymore but I leave it here for archival purposes. It might prove an interesting or even a useful read for someone else applying for GSoC in ScummVM. It was a good ride...

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