The Sierra Network / ImagiNation versions

[OmerMor]

Any news Tawmis?

[Tawmis]

Crikey. I keep saying when I organize my closet I will do it (I will take a picture when I get home to explain why!) - but I will try to do this today and just get the painful process of dealing with the closet over with.

[Tawmis]

Hah! Prepare for an onslaught of photos as soon as I download them from my phone!

[Tawmis]

Look over here.

Though, it may not be much help. All the various disks shown for INN were shoved in that passport box thing... And I believe it's three different versions 2.2, 2.3 and 2.4

[OmerMor]

Thanks Tawmis - Is there any way for you to dump & upload the installation floppies of all versions?

[Tawmis]

Thanks Tawmis - Is there any way for you to dump & upload the installation floppies of all versions?

The CD I could do. The 3.5 I could probably also do (would have to see if I could get my hands on a USB 3.5). But the 5.25" disks might be an issue.

Will dig around and see if I can find a way to get these for you!

[Collector]

I can read 5.25" disks. If there is no CD or 3.5" disk copy of those versions I could zip up the contents for you.

[OmerMor]

Sorry for resurrecting such an old thread, but I wanted to share a link to my current archive:
https://drive.google.com/folderview?id= ... sp=sharing

The versions I got so far are:

• TSN v10.2
• INN v2.0
• INN v2.1
• INN v2.2
• INN v2.3
• INN v2.4

[Collector]

For the copies that were distributed on CD there does not seem to be much indicating the version. The copy that shipped with Phantasmagoria has a TSNVER file that has 33!!@. Without going through the bother of looking inside the files do you know of a way to determine version?

[OmerMor]

I managed to determine the version by installing it, and running it. To install you need to mount the installation files into drive A inside DOSBox and run INSTALL. Otherwise the installation will think the game is already install and will just let you change the configuration.
Short of v2.0, all of them show the version in their title bar.
v2.0 is trying to connect (and fails) before giving you any useful information - I don't remember where I got its version from.

[Collector]

I have TSN 2.0 and TSN 2.1. if you want them. I don't know what else I may have. Kind of a pain to install each just to get the version, but given that I have nearly all of the SCI games (at least one version of each) it would be a chore to go through all of my disks and CDs to check for all of the copies of TSN/INN I have. Some not only need to be installed, but need to be setup to log into the ImagiNation Revival server to get into it enough to get to the version info. And unfortunately SV does not open these, even though it seems to be a variant of SCI and a lot of the engine code is by Jeff Stephenson.

A tool to extract version strings would be very helpful. It looks like it would not be that hard to get the interpreter version, but the INN version would be more involved. It is probably in a script inside one of the archive files, so it would have to be unpacked and then if the strings are not decipherable it would have to be decompiled or at least disassembled. I wonder if the people that have been REing the INN server might have some tools that the have made that would suffice. I had requested access to their Google group, but never heard anything from them.

Anyway, I am going through all of my disks to archive them with my KryoFulx. I will at least grab the TSN/INN copies included, even if I do not have time to manually extract version info.

[OmerMor]

I agree that a tool for extracting the version would be great.
However, short of that, I think I can write a list of my versions with the timestamps of their main files / installation files. It is more easily retrieved.

[Collector]

I dumped the scripts from INN v2.0 and found the credits in script.097 with a reference to version and revision, but am not sure how to determine version from it. I am not sure how consistent that script.097 contains credits across versions. I'll have to dump more versions.

[OmerMor]

Interesting. I've no idea how to parse the binary part of this file.
Maybe our friend Phil would be able to decompile it?

[Collector]

Of course the real trick will be how to extract just the version number. The dumper is in C# and includes an unpacker in C++. If we knew how to parse it and the credits was consistently 097 I could write a version checker. Might be nice to have a tool to get the interpreter version. Gumby wrote a C# class to extract the SCI interpreter versions that I include in a couple of the SCI tools I wrote. The LSCI interpreter is probably similar enough that this class might be adapted to LSCI.

BTW, are you still in contact with the group that is trying to rewrite the INN server?