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.)

So I’m making my own install/setup program for The Dating Pool, that also happens to be 100% compatible with Sierra’s games. Fun, fun. What’s was particularly funny to me is the size difference.

Sierra’s installer is at minimum three separate files. One is the installer proper @ 74.4 KB, one is the on-screen text @ 9.21 KB, and one is the driver database @ 17.2 KB, totaling 100 KB. Add to that the “install to hard drive” script file for another 1.80 KB if you want, but that’s optional.

Mine is, with all the features it has to offer so far (and I can certainly add more) a mere 34.4 KB. This includes every single bit of on-screen text. It is almost entirely self-contained. The presence of a single extra file switches it into “install to hard drive” mode, and that file merely specifies the standard target directory and the number of disks. Add another four kilobytes if you build with -DISOFONT for 256×16 bytes of extra font data, subtract about a half if you build without -DNORTON.

But then I wondered, how does Sierra’s installer do a bunch of things exactly? Like how does it know it’s being run from CD so it knows to invoke that script at the end, among other things? It’s not the presence of the script file, since that’s copied right along. So I opened it up in IDA… and was told it was compressed.

Turns out install.exe is actually a whopping 167 KB. You’ll excuse me for my curiosity…

17.7 KB. With everything but the disk install trigger file built-in. Sweet Christmas.

Let’s summarize!

First of course we had this subdued thing. It doesn’t state its version number, and has no main menu – it just goes through all the different driver selections, then offers to copy the game to your hard drive. I got this from The Colonel’s Bequest. King’s Quest IV (1988) has the same, but with a different caption: “3D Adventure Game Setup/Installation Program”.

Unstated version, goes through a fixed script asking which driver you want and if you want to copy the game to your hard drive at the end, exactly like the original… but in color! Found this one in Space Quest IV (disk version).

Version 3.15b looks like the SQ4D version, but actually has a proper menu like those from later on. This one is from the Leisure Suit Larry 1 SCI remake.

Version 3.31 brings the finalized style. This copy is from the Space Quest I remake.

Version 3.569 is pretty much the same, but the copyright box is taller.

Version 3.681, again not much to write home about. The copyright has been amended. I got this from Space Quest III, which is chronologically confusing to me. Version 3.690, from Freddy Pharkas, bumps it up to 1991-94… but to add to the confusion, the diskette version of Freddy Pharkas is version 3.644, with a 1991-93 copyright. To round out the confusion, the SVGA version of Leisure Suit Larry 6 has installer version 3.670, copyright 1991-93 as well. What ever!

Rounding out the official installers we have King’s Quest 7′s installer, now called inst.exe, version 3.758.

And finally, because nobody asked for it…

…there’s my from-scratch rewrite. Functionally on par, this is still missing a few features such as viewing a readme file, making a boot disk, detecting if a given driver is supported to begin with (it only shows known drivers that it can find the DRV file for, like the B/W installers, but doesn’t do the “supported by your system” tick marks), only showing options in the main menu if there’s a choice – if you only have VGA320.DRV, it shouldn’t show “Graphics”. The minimal menu should only show “Mouse”, “Memory”, “Make boot disk”, “Accept”, and “Cancel”, and actually installing the game to HDD (at least, the same way Sierra’s does). But other than that, it’s basically a drop-in replacement.

That version number will reach 1.000 soon enough, mark my words.

From day one, the title screen for The Dating Pool has been rendered, with one short intermission. Looking back at my development archives, I felt I should show the unseen. So in the inimitable words of Verka Serduchka… Let’s begin!

The original title screen was a closeup of the main character’s little black book, in what was then planned to be her bedroom. Between the default textures and the book’s cover being edited in post, I honestly can’t remember why I replaced it… but it’s not exactly evocative of a “dating pool”, or any kind of pool, really.

Ah, the original demo release’s title screen. This is actually slightly newer than it should be at this point, with the wine and glass added, but who’s keeping track? Maybe me at best, but I hardly did. Anyway, I’m not gonna hunt down a copy without the wine only to post this version a little later.

At one point I figured the 3D renders could serve as the basis for pixel art redraws. I put hours into this image, only to not use it at all. Honestly, I can’t quite remember why I gave up on that idea. But before the demo was in a playable state, I’d reverted to the render and added the wine. Perhaps it was just to not increase the workload even more, or maybe it was because it didn’t actually help solve some issues with global palettes that I’d hoped it would. Oh well, what’s a few wasted hours when you have this much free time to waste to begin with?

And that brings us to the title screen as it is now. The Itch demo has a slightly earlier version of this screen that’s a bit shinier in silly places, but otherwise it’s the same.

(2018 note: the above paragraph was later outdated by an updated demo release.)

I wonder if should put some animation in this. The old screen had the flickering candles… Anyone?

Ah, Sierra. You gotta love the beautiful background art in their VGA games. From the cartoony…

…to the outright pretty…

…you have to admit someone was credit to team.

But then there’s games where they seemingly dropped the ball (in my opinion) for whatever style-related reason…

…or simply didn’t do much “background art” at all…

And that makes me feel…

Well, okay, I guess, about using edited Gmod screenshots from Letrune in “The Dating Pool”, turning this…

…into this:

Yes folks, that’s right. It’s a brand-new point-and-click adventure romp!

If you think that looks at all like the classic Sierra interface, you’d be right! This not only looks like a classic Sierra game, it actually runs on the same engine! None of that cheap-ass Adventure Game Studio bullshit here, folks, this is the real deal!

And just in time for New Years Eve, here’s a public preview release: http://helmet.kafuka.org/sci/catdate

Go ahead and try it. If you have any suggestions for the full version, including things you’d change in the part shown in this demo, don’t hesitate – my askbox is open.

(Protip: get DOSBox.)

Update: crash fixed in certain scene, thanks to @iliketurnips for notifying me.

Crazy how Mark Crowe did that.