Macromedia Director 7

[Maricel Fergason]

Directorwas the primary editor on the Adobe Shockwave platform, which dominated the interactive multimedia product space during the 1990s.[1] Various graphic adventure games were developed with Director during the 1990s, including Living Books, The Journeyman Project, Total Distortion, Eastern Mind: The Lost Souls of Tong Nou, Mia's Language Adventure, Mia's Science Adventure, and the Didi & Ditto series. Hundreds of free online video games were developed using Lingo, and published on websites such as Miniclip and Shockwave.com.

Director published DCR files that were played using the Adobe Shockwave Player, in addition to compiling native executables for Microsoft Windows and Mac OS X. Director allowed users to build applications on a movie metaphor, with the user as the "director" of the movie. Originally designed for creating animation sequences, the addition of a scripting language called Lingo made it a popular choice for creating CD-ROMs, standalone kiosks and internet video games content during the 1990s.

Director applications are authored on a timeline, similar to Adobe Flash. Director supports graphical primitives and playback controls such as video players, 3D content players, and Flash players. Director includes a scripting language called Lingo, and plug-in applications called Xtras, which are similar in functionality and design to ActiveX. Director supports a graphical user interface framework with basic controls and allows interaction with external files and certain Windows APIs. Director has been used to create applications, 2D and 3D video games, self-running kiosks, and CDs and DVD launchers. Director supports many different images, audio, and video formats.

Director includes a scripting language called Lingo, and a suite of 2D image manipulation tools referred to as "imaging Lingo". This subset of Lingo allows authors to perform advanced operations such as to bitblit. While a vast majority of users rely on the score timeline for the development of their work, a number of expert developers create stunning projects, such as games, that take advantage of the speed of imaging Lingo. These advanced projects typically use only 1 frame on the score timeline using Lingo to control animation and interaction. Director 8.5 added the ability to import, manipulate, and display 3D objects. The 3D features were quite advanced for the time, unusual for an authoring environment. The 3D capability includes the ability to create geometry on the fly from code, hardware accelerated model display, and advanced lighting features. It also supports vector graphics and 3D interactivity through a Shockwave 3D file object. Since Version 6, Director has supported the import of Flash animation files and Lingo can be used to interact with Flash's Actionscript code for more control.

One of the most powerful aspects of Director is its extensibility, which is achieved through plug-in applications named Xtras. For example, there are Xtras for OS desktop manipulations (creating folders, files, icons, shortcuts, registry editing) and Shell control, dedicated text processing (RegX), PDF readers, and many more. With Xtras, Director can be extended to support additional media types beyond those that the stock version of the software allows. These can be created by users or purchased from third-party vendors. They are created using Adobe Director's XDK (Xtra Development Kit), a C++ SDK. With the change in new versions of Director, Xtra developers need to modify their products to maintain ongoing support. With changing industry trends, many third-party Xtra developers have discontinued products and dropped support due to the cost of development without a significant return.

For online distribution, the Director can publish projects for embedding in websites using the Shockwave plugin. Shockwave files have a .dcr file extension. Other publishing options include a stand-alone executable file called projectors, supported on Macintosh and Windows operating systems, and with Director 12, output for iOS. Early versions also supported execution of the 3DO console. The Director score timeline can also be exported as a non-interactive video format, such as a QuickTime or sequence of images.

From 1995 to 1997, a competing multimedia authoring program called mTropolis (from mFactory). In 1997, mTropolis was purchased and buried by Quark, Inc., who had its own plans into multimedia authoring with Quark Immedia.

The first Director release under the Adobe brand (v. 11), released after a gap of four years, featured DirectX 9 and Unicode support and extended 3D capabilities based on the NVIDIA PhysX engine, as well as bitmap filters, enhanced video, audio and image file formats support, and Adobe Flash CS3 integration. Shockwave Player 11 was also released.

Version 11.5 added 5.1 channel surround sound audio capabilities, real-time mixing, audio effects and DSP filters. Also, there is added support for H.264-video integration for full-screen and high-definition playback. Other supported formats include: 3D importer for Google SketchUp, streaming support using RTMP and ByteArray datatypes.

it depends how deep you want to dig into the executable and what kind of data you need from the exe.As with all exe files you can analyse them on a low level. But I assume you want to have a high-level tool to get back the director files that were used to create the exe, right?For the exe-file (the "projector" to use the appropriate director wording) there is no such tool known to me.

But very often the exe file is used together with files with extensions such as .dxr or .dir. Those are director files. DXR-Files are protected. But by importing them into director you can extract some of the cast memebers (graphics etc.) that are included. You need in-deep knowledge of lingo to do so.

All in all - it is not easy and your chances are low to completly reveal all code and media. Most director programmer use the protected files for distributing their programs. Those do not allow to reveal all data included.

So I have this children game that is created using Macromedia Director v4 which is a 16-bit executable. Does anyone know if there exists a wrapper or any other method to play these type of games natively under Windows 10 64-bit?

Cheers for the suggestions. WineVDM looks promising, but I need to look more into how to load DLL's required by the game that is supposed to be in the Windows directory. Maybe (hopefully) they can also be in the same folder as the executable.

The Macromedia Director engine was partially implemented by iskrich for the Google Summer of Code in 2016 and was further implemented by the Google Summer of Code students djsrv and npjg in 2020 and the Google Summer of Code students djsrv and sheep in 2021.

Point ScummVM to engines/director/lingo/tests, that will create target 'directortest'. Launching it will try to compile and execute all *.lingo files in that directory. The tests can also be run from the command line with:

Assuming you want to run all director movies in a given director. Create an empty file called 'lingotests-all' in that directory. Point ScummVM to that directory and add it as a game. That will run all director files in that directory. This can also be run from the commandline with:

There is a number of debugflags which could be turned on. The up-to-date list could be found in director.cpp in the DirectorEngine class constructor. You turn the flags with --debugflags=,. Please, denote, that messages are often stored at several levels, so add with something like debug level 5, e.g. -d5. Example:

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