Re: Kgent N5 Edge Flash File MT6572 Firmware Update Tested
Vida Hubbert
Now, good luck, and fingers crossed you can find the perp. Otherwise, your bureau chief will have you getting up close and personal with toilet duties for the rest of your career. Oh, and PS: The viewpoints of different aliens differ. For the Bartender, who has segmented eyes, even the original developers felt it was difficult and left in a cheat key of ScrollLock to switch back to a single viewpoint. Feel free to use it if, at any point, the flashback becomes too much for you :)
On Wednesday 1st May Google announced the list of participants accepted for this year's Google Summer of Code and we are very happy to report that 4 contributors have been accepted to work on various parts of the ScummVM project this summer.
ScummVM requires game data files to operate. Frequently, especially when copying from the old media, the files can be damaged. Thus, a system that could let the end-users compute checksums and compare them with known good references is desirable.
Macromedia Director is a popular multimedia authoring tool from the 90s, and many iconic adventure titles have been released using it. Improving its support in ScummVM will preserve gaming history and provide players with access to beloved classics.
K-D Labs created qdEngine and it has been used in several point-and-click adventure games, primarily in Russian, and also translated into Lithuanian, Czech and English. The most known games are Pilot Brothers 3 and Pilot Brothers 3D.
ScummVM includes a global fully configurable keymapper, but this requires engines to be adapted to use it. The goal of this project is to fully integrate ScummVM keymapper into a large number of our supported engines.
We also wanted to take the time to thank everyone who applied to ScummVM for this year's Google Summer of Code programme. Unfortunately, not every application was successful, but we are so grateful for the interest shown and would love you all to still consider helping with ScummVM in some capacity in the future.
1987: In the small town of Thimbleweed Park, two officers-a-reno are investigating a murder.The body, still in the process-a-reno of being pixelated, lies in the river.The agents meet a video game developer, a mysterious clown who never takes off his make-up, and many other strange characters.
Step into the shoes of a heroic archeologist on October 26, 1930, as a total solar eclipse akin to the one happening today over North America looms over Cairo. Knowing of the Ardognus prophecy, created by the powerful high priest Hahmid III, you must find and destroy the hidden shrine devoted to Ra before the eclipse occurs.
Our modern reimplementation of the Freescape engine features graphics using hardware mode (OpenGL) at arbitrary resolution. The initial Total Eclipse support includes DOS (EGA/CGA modes), ZX Spectrum, and Amstrad CPC. More releases are coming at a later date. Additionally, there are three playable demos if you want to test the game. Please contact us if you have some other release or demo.
Like last year, participants can apply for working on either short tasks (about 175 hours of work), or large tasks (about 350 hours of work). The coding period typically runs from start of June through August, but there is some flexibility which allows participants to have longer time frames if they are unable to work full time through the summer.
ScummVM is looking for people interested in participating in GSoC with us. A list of suggested projects can be found on this page, but we are also open to your own ideas as well. Please provide the required information in your application before submitting.
We also strongly encourage you to join our Discord server, in the #scummvm-gsoc channel. This allows you to engage with our mentors and the rest of the team, to get advice about how to get involved with the project, as well as writing your application.
A poor test subject is doomed to repeat an hour over and over again. Trying desperately to prove his species worth as something better than merely meat to be ground into intergalactic fast food burgers.
The ScummVM Team is pleased to announce full support for Orion Burger, the classic game by Sanctuary Woods. The engine also adds a few niceties that the original didn't have, such as mouse wheel handling, and using the spacebar to skip walk animations - something the original didn't do properly.
Help us test the game by grabbing a daily build. Read through our testing guidelines. The game's logic was all hardcoded, so we really need people to try all sorts of weird actions, and make sure the game handles everything correctly and matches the original implementation. And please take some screenshots along the way.
We are happy to see the RetroArch port being properly rewritten, and the port is now part of our source code. The Atari port has also been redone from scratch and now talks natively to the hardware, skipping SDL as an intermediate layer. That made many more games playable on the platform. The Atari FireBee port is still using the SDL library, though.
Thanks to the work of one of the GSoC participants this year, Wyatt Radkiewicz (a.k.a. eklipsed), we now use CPU-specific SIMD instructions such as SSE, AVX2, and NEON for drawing graphics in the AGS engine and in some generic routines. This led to 4-14x speedup in drawing for many cases.
This year, we merged with the Backyard Sports Online project, which made it possible to play Backyard Football, Backyard Baseball 2001 and Backyard Football 2002 over the internet with other humans. Also, the Moonbase Commander support is in active playtesting mode, though not yet ready for prime time.
Believe it or not, we implemented a lot of native GUI dialogs for SCUMM games, bringing them closer to the original experience. We also rewrote the sound code for the SCUMM Humongous Entertainment games, making them flawless.
We performed a deep review of the Broken Sword 1 game engine, implementing some small, previously unnoticed things like scene transitions, in-game menu peculiarities, accurate fonts, idle animations, and more. Now, the game is absolutely faithful to the original.
On our downloads page, you can find the downloads for various platforms. If you are using Windows, macOS, or either the Ubuntu Snap or Flatpack packages, the autoupdater will assist you in updating to ScummVM 2.8.0. Android port will follow up very shortly, as we are currently in the Open Beta phase.
The end of the year is almost upon us, along with a new release of ScummVM. So here's a quick update for one of the more ambitious sub-projects that has been percolating along in the background: Macromedia Director support! For those who aren't aware, Macromedia Director was a popular framework used for thousands of games, educational titles, catalogues, art pieces, and other multimedia works.
You will need the data files from the games' original install media, and a daily build of ScummVM. For Macintosh editions, you will need to run the disc images through Dumper Companion in order to extract a complete copy of the files. In the case of The Dark Eye, you will also need the files created by the installer. As always, if you run into issues, please let us know on the issue tracker.
If your favorite isn't in the supported list, don't despair! ScummVM can open Director titles from 1995 and earlier, so grab the latest daily build and give it a try. Titles released after 1995 tend to use Director versions that aren't supported yet. If you get stuck, reach out on the issue tracker and we can try and help.
ScummVM 2.8.0 will be the first release to include preliminary support for the D5 version of Director! A lot of work has gone into overhauling the codebase to support multiple cast libraries, however there is still plenty of work to be done adding Lingo functions and Xtras.
Adding support for a new Director version is a tricky process. First we need to check for any changes to the movie file format, then add in any new engine and Lingo features, and finally start working through issues in a bunch of candidate games. Because of the difficulty of keeping track of facts vs. assumptions, we only enable features for an engine version once they have been confirmed with testing. This is why D6 and higher games will not open at all, even if the code we have would somewhat work.
Support for the D2, D3 and D4 versions of Director has steadily improved. We are building up a suite of unit tests, both for Lingo and for the various drawing modes in the renderer. Most of the remaining bugs are related to undefined or incidental behavior: consider how two types in Lingo are compared, or the precise order that events are processed in, or how functions respond when you pass them nonsense data? All of these things are relied upon by thousands of Director products! And ScummVM must support all of them as closely as possible.
Macromedia provided a C API with Director, which proved to be very popular for adding new engine features. There are hundreds of XObject and Xtra libraries in circulation, and each has to be reverse engineered and added as code to ScummVM. As of the time of writing, we have added support for 63 of these libraries.
A common use case is video; Director includes the ability to play back QuickTime videos as a sprite, but computers of the day would struggle with the added overhead of Director's renderer if the video resolution was larger than a postage stamp. To work around this, several XLibs exist to play back video as an accelerated overlay. Quite a few D3 and D4 titles are missing video playback due to this type of XLib, and we plan on creating a common method of supporting these.
The good news is that most uncommon XLibs did only one or two things, and are pretty easy to add initial support for. Part of the XLib format is a list of docstrings explaining each of the functions; there is a script in /devtools which can turn these docstrings into stubbed C++ code, saving a lot of hassle.
That's about it! We have some very dedicated volunteers scouring every corner of the globe for obscure Director titles and testing them; if that sounds like your bag, you can visit them in the #engine-director channel of the ScummVM Discord. Until next time!
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