They’re not really that weird on the face of it, but that depends on who’s looking.

The decompiler in SCI Companion is a work of art. You can tell because I didn’t write it. (I only fixed a thing or two.) But there are some things that it can’t figure out, and when that happens the function or method body is replaced with a raw asm block. For example, the copy protection in Laura Bow 2 – The Dagger of Amon Ra has loop in it that SCI Companion can’t hack.

It’s a bit much to take in but the important bits are as follows: this code block (rm18::init) has four discrete segments. The first isn’t shown here and sets up a few simple things. The second (code_0087) is a regular loop, where temp0 counts up from zero to eleven. When it hits twelve, the loop is broken and we go to section three, code_00ad. Section three is a weird loop. If you look at the check at the top we see this:

pushi #size
pushi 0
lofsa tempList
send 4
bnt code_0116

Which basically means that when (tempList size?) returns zero/is false, we skip to section four. At the bottom of the section, right before the label for code_0116, there’s the command that makes section three a loop; jmp code_00ad.

So that means that section three keeps repeating until tempList is out of items. Section two put a bunch of values in it, and section three then takes items out at random and puts them into goodList, effectively randomizing the order. The items, incidentally, are the tiles depicting the various Egyptian gods that the copy protection is all about, clones of egyptProp given increasing cel values. Section three positions them as they’re added to goodList. It’s a good routine, Brent.

The problem that trips up SCI Companion and makes it spit out the stuff in those two pictures is that it doesn’t recognize the second loop for what it is. Counting from one value to another by a given increment? Easy. Iterating over a collection? It can figure those out. But picking items from a bag until it’s empty? That’s not on the menu.

To make this decompile, then, we first need to break the loop by commenting out that last jmp command. A single ; suffices. Compile the script resource, then go back and re-decompile it. A conditional loop, of course, consists of a check and a jump. We removed the jump so now it’s just the check:

(method (init &tmp i theTile theX theY)
  (LoadMany rsVIEW 18) ; load the tiles
  (super init:)
  (gGame handsOn:)
  (gIconBar disable: 0 1 3 4 5 6 7)
  (goodList add:)
  (tempList add:)
  (= theX -32)
  (= theY 46)
  (= i 0)
 
  ; Instantiate twelve tiles, with increasing cel numbers.
  (while (< i 12)
    (tempList add: ((egyptProp new:) cel: i yourself:))
    (++ i)
  )
 
  ; This should be "(while (tempList size?)" but we removed the jump, remember?
  (if (tempList size?)
    ; Pick a tile number.
    (= i (Random 0 (- (tempList size?) 1)))
    ; Get the i-th tile.
    (= theTile (tempList at: i))
 
    ; Set up the tile's position on the grid and add it to goodList.
    (goodList add:
      (theTile
         x: (= theX (+ theX 48))
         y: theY
         yourself:
      )
    )
    ; Once we're halfway through, CRLF to the next row.
    (if (== (goodList size?) 6)
      (= theX -32)
      (= theY 111)
    )
 
    ; Actually remove the tile from tempList so we won't pick it again.
    (tempList delete: theTile)
  )
 
  ; Section four
  (gGame handsOff:)
  (self setScript: sInitEm)
)

The cool part is that once we replace that if with a while and compile the script, the result is effectively the same as the original. Only some of the specific opcode choices are different. For example, the original uses the two-byte pushi 1 throughout (also 0 and 2), but SCI Companion’s script compiler prefers to use the one-byte push1 there. The same values are pushed regardless.

So as established, there are three different Prints in SCI.

• Print the function, in SCI0
• PrintD the function, supplementing Print, in SCI1
• Print the class, in SCI11.

They each have their own strengths and weaknesses, of course.

	SCI0	SCI1	SCI11
Max text items	1	infinite
Max buttons	6	infinite
Max icons	1	infinite
Max input fields	1	infinite
Animated icons¹	yes	no	yes
Size to fit	yes
Size to max width	yes	no	yes
Auto-dismiss	yes	no	yes
Auto-layout²	yes		no
Position	yes
Font	yes
Text tuples³	yes	no	yes

¹: Animated icons require the ability to pass a reference to a DCIcon object instead of a view/loop/cel tuples.

²: Items added by PrintD flow to the right with a four pixel margin. Pass the #new command argument to reset the flow to the left edge and below the last item, or the #x/#y modifiers to shift the last item’s position. In the Print class, every item added must be manually positioned as everything defaults to the top-left. The Print function has its limits specifically because it automatically lays out the controls.

³: The Print class being from SCI11, it takes noun/verb/case/seq tuples.

That comes down to the following actions:

SCI0 Print: required string or tuple for text (may be empty), mode, font, width, time, title, at, draw, edit, button (up to six times), icon, dispose, window, first

SCI1 PrintD: new, at, title, first, text, button, icon, edit, x, y

SCI11 Print: addButton, addEdit, addIcon, addText, addTextF, addTitle, posn methods, plus mode, font, width, ticks, modeless, and saveCursor properties

…And then I messed everything up by rewriting PrintD as a wrapper around the Print class so it runs on SCI11, adding everything but auto-dismiss and animated icon support. It’s available from my SCI stash, of course. Hell, by this time tomorrow those last two things may well be included.

SCI11 PrintD: all of SCI1’s, plus modNum, cue, font, and width

Oddly, this one’s entirely script based.

I was reminded of this when I watched one of Space Quest Historian’s videos, where he played the Space Quest 2 remake by Infamous Quests. Now, one thing he mentions about the version he plays in that video is that besides the narrator being muted so he can narrate it himself, well…

but recently Steve Alexander, who was one of the co-CEOs of Infamous Quests had a little peek around the old game files and decided to spruce it up a bit, fix some old bugs, add some you know, touch-ups here and there. Most importantly, at least according to him, replace the standard AGS font with something that looks a little more Sierra-ish. And that’s the version I’m going to play.

All well and good but then the main menu appeared and I noticed just how important this font thing seemed to be.

One thing immediately came to mind when I saw this. Notice how the button cuts into the caption? If I was a betting cat, I’d say the original version’s main font was just slightly shorter than this replacement. Also when I prepared the image I noticed each of these buttons has a different height, but that’s not the issue here — that’s just sloppy work.

This thing with the buttons cutting into the message text? It can’t happen accidentally in SCI0/1, but it can easily happen in SCI11. How is that?

In SCI1, the system scripts include a PrintD function. It’s pretty powerful on the face of it:

(PrintD
	"Would you like to skip\nthe introduction or\nwatch the whole thing?"
	#at 100 60
	#new
	#button "Skip it" 0
	#new
	#button "Watch it" 1
	#new
	#button "Restore a Game" 2
)

And that gives you this:

The function itself will track how large every item should be as they are defined, and adjust the final size of the window accordingly. Just to simplify the explanation a bit. And then it’ll return the value of a given button so the game knows how to react.

(Update: SCI0 had Print which worked not entirely unlike this, and SCI1 added PrintD as a more streamlined variant with #new support, because…)

In SCI11, Print is now an object. You have to call a bunch of methods on it, in sequence, then finish with an init: call, and that will trigger its display and return the value chosen. But one important distinction is that addText:, addButton:, and its ilk… don’t automatically position themselves. You have to do that yourself.

That’s why these games came with a built-in dialog creation tool, among others. It’d create code like this:

; DialogEditor v1.0
; by Brian K. Hughes
(Print
	posn:		0 28,
	font:		0,
	addText:	{bluh bluh} 71 18,
	addButton:	0 {button} 71 30,
	addButton:	1 {button} 0 0,
	init:
)

The Sierra programmers could then integrate that into their game scripts. But importantly, those manually-positioned buttons could overlap other controls.

(Update: … PrintD also had a dialog editor made for it. This is pretty explicitly stated in the changelogs.)

AGS dialog boxes also use manual positioning, just with a nice WYSIWYG form editor. So if you take a perfectly good (yeah right) introduction menu and change the font for one with a higher X-height and don’t adjust things… you get that SQ2 window.

Update just because: this is what the SQ4 intro menu would look like with font.001 instead. That is, with SCI1’s PrintD and its automatic layout.