Notices by PulkoMandy (pulkomandy@mastodon.tetaneutral.net)

Me: Can we have a PowerPC computer?
Mom: We have a PowerPC computer at home.
PowerPC at home:

Hi! How is your day going today?

#VTech #VSmile #Contiki

I have just relased a new version 2.9 of GrafX2, "the ultimate 256-color painting program".
Binaries are available for Haiku, Gamepark Holdings GP2x, Nintendo Switch, Atari Mint and Windows (yes, our build automation somehow focuses only on the most ridiculous platforms). For Linux it should hopefully be updated in your favorite distribution soon.
Not a lot of changes in this version, many bugfixes and more fileformats supported (Apple IIgs, C64, CPC, Atari TT...)
#GrafX2 #PixelArt

Why does Linux have so few debug traces in its drivers? In Haiku I can usually just enable/uncomment a `#define TRACE` and get lots of debug info from any driver I need. In Linux, they fail silently or with a very nondescript error ("spi-nor: init failed: -2" or so) and I have to spend a lot of time adding my own traces in all the possible places that can lead to that specific error code until I find where there is a problem…

Some of the games are apparently adaptations of choose your adventure books written by schoolchildren. We acutally wrote one when I was in school but I think it never was turned into a computer game. Might not be too late, I still have a printed copy!

I spent the evening looking at the adventure files in rehex.
The text displayed can include buttons, hyperlinks, and also print variables. It uses an escape sequences system. For example %p is the player name, \o puts an Ok button centered on thelast line, %c1 shows some counter (health points in that case), and {%c1|%m1|%m2~%m3} isa switch-case, with values in ordersand the ~ being for the default case.
Games can also define custom buttons with X/Y hosition and color (from the EGA palette)

However, I have no idea yet how this is all wired together. How to change variable values? Howare objects associated with their descriptions and possible actions? What to do when a button is clicked? How to hide and show buttons? (for example the objects button is visible only in rooms where there is something to pick up)

I made some progress on reverse engineering the game. I now have a good understanding of most of the datafiles, and start to see some patterns in the COND files which seem to contain several small chunks of some kind of bytecode?

Also, I made a wiki about it:

https://pulkomandy.tk/projects/readingame/wiki/WikiStart

I had a train trip today so I started writing a parser in C++. It can show the text and the scripts side by side, which helped a lot in analyzing how things work. It allowed me to identify several more opcodes! So things are starting to make sense.

Let's continue the reverse engineering of the Lectures Enjeu #InteractiveFiction engine today!

Looked at the INIT file for another game today. Now that I have a rehex script that easily separates each chunk in the file, it is a lot easier. Found that chunk 6 defines which "compass" buttons (N,S,E,W, up, down and exit) are available in each room, and can also hide the compass entirely.
Objects have up to 3 actions when they are carried by the player, and 3 others when they are found in a room

There are still some parts of the file I don't understand: the 80 first bytes, the first two bytes at the start of the object chunk (they encode a decimal 1000 in both games), 3 words in each global button (always with the values 0, 1, 7) and 4 words in each object (the first one always 1, the others vary in one of the games)

The second game also has several more bytecode opcodes that I'll have to guess. Maybe I should start writing an interpreter/debugger to experiment with the bytecode

I made some progress on writing the new interpreter for Lectures Enjeu games today!
Got a simple (and ugly) GUI up, implemented rendering of hyperlinks and the global OK button. Implemented a few opcodes in the interpreter so I can move around between different screens and rooms.
I'll continue this over the weekend!

@mntmn @mmu_man @thomholwerda @osnews I see the license does not allow commercial use (that's fine) or distribution of modified versions (that would explain why it isn't in haikuarchives already)

Let us know if it should stay that way, or if you want to change it :)

@mntmn @mmu_man @thomholwerda @osnews that doesn't matter, it can join the collection at github.com/haikuarchives where people might try to improve and update it!

@coolboymew @duffadash The BNF has on-site consultation for some of them. For Lectures Enjeu you can go there and ask them for the floppy disk! Other things have been "digitalized" (well, that doesn't really make sense) and can be accessed from on-site computers (not sure in what format, do they provinde an emulator for old Windows versions?).

Certainly not a perfect solution, but better than nothing, I guess.

I remember playing various edutainment videogames as a kid, they seem not very well archived. Things like Tim 7 (a kid who had his brain erased by a mad scientist and had to relearn French and Math and stuff), Lecture Enjeu (some kind of interactive fiction, several adventures, one of them involved breaking into the school during the weekend to recover a forgotten pair of glasses)

Was this only a French thing? Did you have any similar things? Anyone taking care of archiving these?