Sierra's Space Quest on the TI!

[+Vorticon]

I got an email today from a gentleman named Martin Mangold who apparently programmed an abridged version of Sierra Online's Space Quest in assembly, graphics and all! I have not had a chance to test it extensively yet, but it comes on 3 disks and seems to work beautifully. Amazing job!

 

 

 

Space Quest.zip

[Omega-TI]

While this is not personally my cup of tea, I can imagine there will be a ton of happy campers who'll love this.  The community owes him a debt of gratitude.  I suppose it's only a matter of time before this finds its way into a cartridge .BIN for the FG99.

[+arcadeshopper]

 

[+save2600]

28 minutes ago, Omega-TI said:

I suppose it's only a matter of time before this finds its way into a cartridge .BIN for the FG99.

...sure hope so! Only way I'd be able to play it.  

[Omega-TI]

I was so impressed I figured I might actually give it a try.

Oh, once you start uploading the disk image to the TIPI, go get a cup of coffee, it'll take a while!

 

[+InsaneMultitasker]

Tried it on my Geneve (emulation) and it fired right up. Slick!  I met my demise quickly though lol

 

[+arcadeshopper]

...sure hope so! Only way I'd be able to play it.  [emoji3]

He's delusional it's 3 disks of data

Sent from my LM-V600 using Tapatalk

[+arcadeshopper]

Here's it in tifiles for TIPI the disks don't extract right with the auto conversion so Matt used tidir not sure why http://cloud.tapatalk.com/s/5fb201bda14b3/Space_Quest_TIFILES.zip

here's the attachment:
1605501373_Space_Quest_TIFILES.zip

[+InsaneMultitasker]

1 minute ago, arcadeshopper said:

Here's it in tifiles for TIPI the disks don't extract right with the auto conversion so Matt used tidir not sure whyhttp://cloud.tapatalk.com/s/5fb201bda14b3/Space_Quest_TIFILES.zip
 

Interesting - if I try to View the DV80 files on the disk image TI99Dir spawns a weird read error.   I didn't look into the disk image any further to determine why because the game played fine.  So I thought it must be my system but there could be disk tweaking needed.

[+arcadeshopper]

Yeah it gives a ton of errors like multiple files using the same sector

Sent from my LM-V600 using Tapatalk

[+jedimatt42]

It's pretty cool technically.. I don't think I've seen any other software on the 4A play music while loading records from disk. Entertaining you while loading was a big step in home computer gaming from disk.

[+Vorticon]

Does anyone know Martin? 

[+InsaneMultitasker]

There seem to be two areas in the _H file FDRs (D/V 80) that can affect some file management operations on real hardware and our file management tools.   For this file example, the last sector EOF pointer [52xx] is one greater than it should be and the number of level 3 records allocated [0001] has its bytes reversed. The correct values are [5150 0100].  Fixing these two values allowed me to view an affected DV80 file in TI99Dir and in Disk Utilities.

 

 

edit: clarifications

[Tursi]

Pretty remarkable -- would have been amazing to have back in the day!

 

[jrhodes]

5 hours ago, arcadeshopper said:

Here's it in tifiles for TIPI the disks don't extract right with the auto conversion so Matt used tidir not sure whyhttp://cloud.tapatalk.com/s/5fb201bda14b3/Space_Quest_TIFILES.zip

Sent from my LM-V600 using Tapatalk
 

I can't seem to get that link to work.

Would you mind making a TIFILES zip and attach to a message here?

[ti99iuc]

Wow!!! this is unbelievable!

[Asmusr]

 

Aargh, there is a time limit too.

[Omega-TI]

11 hours ago, arcadeshopper said:

He's delusional it's 3 disks of data

Delusional?  How is that in any way delusional?  It's NOT three FULL disks of data.  By my math the total of those three files only adds up to 571.5K, assuming four sectors is roughly 1K.  Yeah, it would be a real bitch putting it all together for sure, but even with the necessary overhead I doubt it would take nearly a half a megabyte.

[+acadiel]

9 hours ago, InsaneMultitasker said:

There seem to be two areas in the _H file FDRs (D/V 80) that can affect some file management operations on real hardware and our file management tools.   For this file example, the last sector EOF pointer [52xx] is one greater than it should be and the number of level 3 records allocated [0001] has its bytes reversed. The correct values are [5150 0100].  Fixing these two values allowed me to view an affected DV80 file in TI99Dir and in Disk Utilities.

 

 

edit: clarifications

I wonder if this was intentional (copyright protection) or not.  If we do correct the file EOF pointers, I wonder if it'll impact anything in the code.  Suppose we can fix all of them for each file, throw the modded disk images out here in the thread, and crowdsource to see if the game still works fine.

[+Ksarul]

27 minutes ago, Omega-TI said:

Delusional?  How is that in any way delusional?  It's NOT three FULL disks of data.  By my math the total of those three files only adds up to 571.5K, assuming four sectors is roughly 1K.  Yeah, it would be a real bitch putting it all together for sure, but even with the necessary overhead I doubt it would take nearly a half a megabyte.

Well, if we follow the logic you used here, the total file size is still too large for any cartridge boards out there except for the Yellow boards and the boards Tursi designed for Dragon's Lair. It will exceed the 512K limit of the other options. The other issue is in the program's coding--it was designed to load from disk, so it is completely unaware of bank switching. You'd have to go into the program and change the load routines for each scene to load that scene from the banks where it is stored and then continue execution where it left off. On a program of this size, that type of surgery isn't exactly trivial. . .

[+acadiel]

1 minute ago, Ksarul said:

Well, if we follow the logic you used here, the total file size is still too large for any cartridge boards out there except for the Yellow boards and the boards Tursi designed for Dragon's Lair. It will exceed the 512K limit of the other options. The other issue is in the program's coding--it was designed to load from disk, so it is completely unaware of bank switching. You'd have to go into the program and change the load routines for each scene to load that scene from the banks where it is stored and then continue execution where it left off. On a program of this size, that type of surgery isn't exactly trivial. . .

Yeah, the hooks would all have to be changed - from loading DV/80 files with data to "bank to certain bank, copy/read data from there".  Different routines.

 

Should we invent a cartridge ROM read only storage DSR ROM for the side port?  LOL.  

[Omega-TI]

15 minutes ago, Ksarul said:

Well, if we follow the logic you used here, the total file size is still too large for any cartridge boards out there except for the Yellow boards and the boards Tursi designed for Dragon's Lair. It will exceed the 512K limit of the other options. The other issue is in the program's coding--it was designed to load from disk, so it is completely unaware of bank switching. You'd have to go into the program and change the load routines for each scene to load that scene from the banks where it is stored and then continue execution where it left off. On a program of this size, that type of surgery isn't exactly trivial. . .

 

I admit my memory is failing, but it was my understanding that the FinalGROM 99 could use up to one meg files.  I also agree it's not a trivial matter, after all, I did say it would be a bitch.  Now that said, I've seen some pretty amazing stuff come out over the years, stuff that has blown many people's minds here, so I'm never going to say someone is delusional or it cannot be done.  Why?  Because one, it's very antisocial, two, it's just plain rude, and third, history is littered with people with egg on their faces for saying something cannot be done, only to be proven wrong later.

[+InsaneMultitasker]

34 minutes ago, acadiel said:

I wonder if this was intentional (copyright protection) or not.  If we do correct the file EOF pointers, I wonder if it'll impact anything in the code.  Suppose we can fix all of them for each file, throw the modded disk images out here in the thread, and crowdsource to see if the game still works fine.

Good point re: protection.  My thinking is that it could be helpful to share our knowledge (constructively!) with the author that created the disk and if the issues were not intended as copy protection, there may be a tool they and others are using that needs to be fixed.   For all we know, the authors ran into this problem and worked around it in code.

[+-^CrossBow^-]

2 hours ago, Asmusr said:

 

Aargh, there is a time limit too.

Yeap. I think on the original game the time limit is 12 or 15min to get off the Arcadia. But in this version we only appear to have about 10min I think? I'm still trying to figure this out because I'm very familiar with the original EGA PC release of the game and the newer VGA release in the early 90s. Things don't happen the same way on this version. For instance, has anyone figured out how to get the title name for the data disk?

 

Spoiler

I found the note on the dead scientist in the star generator room stating the launch sequence is Kerona. But that isn't the name of the star generator data file that has to be retrieved from the computer data room. In the original game, you would meet up with a wounded scientists that would hobble into the computer data room the second time you entered the room. I've done that multiple times and not had this happen. I've also searched all the bodies and only discovered the keycard and note. So there have been changes made to this version. I'm also thinking that with the points set to only 30, that this is a much cut down version of the game due to limitations but as I've not made it off the Arcadia yet I don't know this for sure.

 

But yes overall this is really impressive and I'd buy it if it were somehow to get a physical cart release, although from reading above, it doesn't sound like that would be a very doable task.

 

[Asmusr]

I managed to solve the game by some accidental cheating. I reached one of the final rooms on disk 3, where I saved and died. When I loaded I was suddenly inside the escape pod, and could perform the final steps to complete the game.