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.)

This is a callout post.

I recently wrote and published a Ranma ½ oneshot fic, I’m a Kittycat, on FFNet and AO3. I got two anonymous guest reviews on the FFNet version, both of which were just so off the mark I couldn’t bear to let them pass the moderation queue.

I would’ve sent a private message to explain why every single sentence in both of them were wrong, but you can’t do that on guest reviews as there’s no account to send them to. Public it is.

So yeah, I deleted them, but kept unaltered copies for later. It’s later now, so let’s see what’s wrong with the shorter of the two. Because of spoilers, I’ll put the actual thing and my reply under readmore.

(Sidenote: what I find particularly interesting is that the two non-anonymous reviews are both positive, and these anonymous reviews were both negative…)

If you are the anonymous guest who wrote this so-called review, please do both of us a favor and don’t reply. I don’t want to know who you are.

Continue reading “This is a callout post”

The Ranma ½ fanfiction community has a bit of a history. People like pata-hikari have written about it before, but it boils down to people copying certain elements from earlier fanfics.

This includes characters’ names.

It’s quite obvious that the three Chinese Amazons warriors have a naming theme going, as is common in manga. “Shampoo”, “Mousse”, and “Cologne”. Besides some people apparently not getting the joke and naming the functionally blind guy “Moose”, there’s the added joke, to some degree, that these are actually mutations of their “proper” Chinese names.

Unfortunately, this only holds up well for Shampoo.

Continue reading “Regarding Shampoo – an open letter to fanfic authors”

For no good reason I just installed and ran Visual Basic 5.0… on Windows 7.

Unsurprisingly, it runs.

More unsurprisingly, there are issues. For example, the placement/sizing rectangles are unbearably sluggish, and you can’t add components to the toolbox without elevation. I mean, if you want to add, say, ComCtl32, you can check it in the list, but pressing OK just gets you a “can’t access the registry” error. You have to run VB5 as admin to make that work.

These and related issues are why I finally stopped using VB6 back then.

And that’s why the real autorun for my game is made in Visual C++, on a Win98 VM.

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.

I don’t have at all as many install/setup programs for Lucas and Coktel games, but I do have these two:

Day of the Tentacle…

…and Goblins 3. Interesting how this is the only one that’s graphical.

That’ll be all.