Posts tagged "unfair deaths"
Show Your Working: Patching a bug in a 25 year old Sierra game
Sat 23 September 2017
Show Your Working is a brand new segment where I write up things I have attempted to fix in open source software. Sometimes it's interesting to debug a problem yourself from first principles, even if the codebase is huge and you don't know anything going in. I will try and explain my thought process as I venture out into the weeds armed only with a butter knife.
The software
ScummVM is a heroic effort to make a cross-platform engine for hundreds of classic adventure games, making them natively playable on modern systems. Since 2010, ScummVM contains an interpreter originally from the FreeSCI project, and by now does a pretty good job playing games based on the Sierra Creative Interpreter. If you haven't heard of ScummVM, I can't recommend it enough.
It's gotten to the point where ScummVM provides a much better experience than emulating the games in DOS/Windows. Still, given that the engine is reverse engineered without the original code, there's all manner of edge cases and quirks that have to be emulated in order for the games to work correctly, as we'll find out!