It’s a followup.

Here’s Roger falling through the chronostream in the introduction:

And here’s the EGA release’s take on that shot:

I immediately thought, of course, the EGA release wouldn’t support palette cycling effects. That’s the official EGA release, with an ega320.drv, not the later ones with ega640.drv. Totally different.

But what if I were to make SQ4 VGA use ega640.drv? What would happen? Would the background remain static?

Keeping the answer under the fold for all you epileptic viewers out there.

Continue reading “Palette Cycling in Space Quest 4”

I distinctly recalled just before posting this that one particular room in Leisure Suit Larry 5 – Passionate Patti does Pittsburgh a Little Undercover Work had a palette cycling effect that bit into the 64 global colors of the palette. So I enabled the debug handler, loaded up ScummVM, and Alt-T’d my way over to room 700.

…It looks perfectly right. That’s not right.

Now, you’ll notice the Fast Forward icon isn’t grayed out. That’s what you get when you cheat, but that’s hardly relevant here.

Had I remembered wrong? Was this the wrong screen? No, surely my memory isn’t that bad? Besides, old adventure games are relevant to my interests. I don’t tend to forget things about those.

But then again, this is ScummVM. What does DOSBox have to say?

Thank you, DOSBox. I figure it must be because ScummVM draws it all in truecolor mode, manually applying the effect to the background, as opposed to the original actually changing the VGA color palette.

(Any political implications are entirely in the reader’s head.)