Post AXrgrQlcMBctNjLXIO by pulkomandy@mastodon.tetaneutral.net
(DIR) More posts by pulkomandy@mastodon.tetaneutral.net
(DIR) Post #AXpbfB2u5t273rqjse by pulkomandy@mastodon.tetaneutral.net
2023-07-18T21:31:26Z
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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?
(DIR) Post #AXpbiGXg7C8eyciVrk by mmu_man@m.g3l.org
2023-07-18T21:34:38Z
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@pulkomandy poke @occitel
(DIR) Post #AXrFd37UmY6PE0UuAa by coolboymew@shitposter.club
2023-07-19T16:36:53.009332Z
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@pulkomandy There's possibly software made for specific schools/school groupsWhen I was a kid, in QC, there was a Macintosh Classic app called "L'arbre à lettres", which was more or less a series of minigames puzzles and it lasted like 5-10minsThere is nothing about it online
(DIR) Post #AXrFjyJN3fVQL4Lwjw by duffadash@digipres.club
2023-07-19T10:18:19Z
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@pulkomandy Thankfully many national archives do actually have most edutainment titles archived, the issue is more that they have no real legal way to make said games available to the general public due to restrictive laws.
(DIR) Post #AXrFjzSylQmlv9r8M4 by coolboymew@shitposter.club
2023-07-19T16:38:09.292447Z
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@duffadash @pulkomandy the problem with such archives is that by the time the copyright is out, will there even be a way to probably run them, or anyone else that actually gives a shit about it? How disappointing. A lot of these were decades of computer/OSes ago, they should be freed already
(DIR) Post #AXrG9ON5IyuMOyDAKe by pulkomandy@mastodon.tetaneutral.net
2023-07-19T16:41:49Z
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@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.
(DIR) Post #AXrGEbHEkX9RsMxYYq by coolboymew@shitposter.club
2023-07-19T16:43:42.341913Z
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@pulkomandy @duffadash archive.org has dosbox, Genesis and more emulators that you can play from the browser. That would be the better solution, but honestly, the best solution would be to just freely distribute it at this point
(DIR) Post #AXrgrOu3HrBVbJHFAG by pulkomandy@mastodon.tetaneutral.net
2023-07-19T16:27:43Z
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(DIR) Post #AXrgrQlcMBctNjLXIO by pulkomandy@mastodon.tetaneutral.net
2023-07-19T16:31:39Z
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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!
(DIR) Post #AYrqIMjpPgRyRHIjVg by pulkomandy@mastodon.tetaneutral.net
2023-07-19T21:48:56Z
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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)
(DIR) Post #AYrqINmLXo3hfNUG4e by pulkomandy@mastodon.tetaneutral.net
2023-07-19T21:50:56Z
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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)
(DIR) Post #AYrqIOfIFW0kPnC8ie by pulkomandy@mastodon.tetaneutral.net
2023-07-20T20:33:29Z
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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
(DIR) Post #AYrqIPULBiqOy74uHo by pulkomandy@mastodon.tetaneutral.net
2023-07-21T19:58:35Z
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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.
(DIR) Post #AYrqIQLryhf7e87eim by pulkomandy@mastodon.tetaneutral.net
2023-07-26T20:26:40Z
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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
(DIR) Post #AYrqIR4XIdOJsf1KLI by pulkomandy@mastodon.tetaneutral.net
2023-07-26T20:29:44Z
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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
(DIR) Post #AYrqIRkiln8RzUl160 by pulkomandy@mastodon.tetaneutral.net
2023-08-18T21:18:12Z
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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!
(DIR) Post #AYxwLtmmlS84TcVnQe by pulkomandy@mastodon.tetaneutral.net
2023-08-19T22:29:19Z
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Progress today on the Lectures Enjeu interpreter: gleaned up the GUI a little, fixed a bug in Haiku BTextView in the process. Some of my opcodes are not doing the right thing and the adventure isn't playable normally yet (reversed conditions and the like). I tried to run another adventure and can't even get past the title screen.Made some progress on the debugger window.I need to rework the escape sequence parsing code to properly handle conditional text and strings referencing other strings
(DIR) Post #AYxwM9hha7ZNqUFxj6 by pulkomandy@mastodon.tetaneutral.net
2023-08-21T19:43:42Z
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This is starting to look like something...- Added the "global" buttons that are always available at the bottom (in this case health and inventory) but did not completely wire them yet- Made the disassembler show its result in the Debugger window instead of the console, and highlight the last run line. I have to cleanup the variables dumps and highlight changed and maybe tested variables. Is a step by step run mode necessary?#InteractiveFiction #ReverseEngineering
(DIR) Post #AZ04AIx4Yn5x0BE41o by pulkomandy@mastodon.tetaneutral.net
2023-08-22T20:22:55Z
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Today progress on the Lectures Enjeu #ReverseEngineering :- Decoding the list of objects, added object names to the debugger- Decoded the INIT file header by comparing the content for all games (it is mainly GUI layout, I confirmed this by patching one of the games to change the main window colors and size)- Continuing to tweak the interpreter and trying to really make sense of the opcodes. I should try other games now, some crash immediately and some don't go past the first screen
(DIR) Post #AZ04AKqlVDEotCI3TU by pulkomandy@mastodon.tetaneutral.net
2023-08-22T20:24:06Z
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I also noticed that the adventures distributed with the engine are not in the IFDB #InteractiveFiction catalog. How would I go about adding them there? One entry for each game or a single entry for everything? Anyone wants to help with that part?