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Is there anyway to make rama not require cd change? I'm asking not because i'm too lazy to press ctrl+f4, but because i want to minimize space wasted, so i want to share bytes between scummvm datafiles and the DOSBox version.

This is possible in most other scummvm games because either the installer has a full install option (like most of those here) or because the game only requires a single cd with no cd audio, and DOSBox has a feature to mount dirs as a cd (you can't change cd or support cd-audio though). I know that some scummvm games require renaming of files but that's pretty irrelevant, because of hardlinks (clone files without copying the bytes). Similarly, if a installer was done that combined multiple compressed file on the cd into a single datafile that the dos executable can run, scummvm could be updated to support (more like recognize, because it loads unknown files easily as long as they're not known 'pirate' versions) that one easily.

So the 'problem' on this case can be approached in two ways: either convince DOSBox devs to extend the dir mount feature, or create a no-cd installer that supports the game and runs it on DOSBox (by combining files into a single resource or not) and then convince scummvm to recognize that version if required.

the problem with RAMA is that UniSCI fails with it, which is what concatenates the SCI resource files. Qbix looked at it one time, didn't get too far. I would think that with ScummVM all you would have to do is copy all of the CDs to one folder. I have not looked at using ScummVM with some of the later SCI games, but I want to re-explore it since SCI32 support is now official.

Are there no sources of UNISCI? Those two games are the exact games i'd like to share game files on DOSBox and scummvm (well, that and world of xeen but that's not relevant).

Have you tried contacting Enrico Rolfi to see if those games can get supported?
apparently he shared the source here:
https://erolfi.wordpress.com/2013/07/26 ... urce-code/

https://docs.google.com/file/d/0B6rGgjY ... 1lTU0/edit

edit: created a post on scummvm forum asking for help on this.

I could extract the resources from the game just fine, but there are quite a few double resources (from different CDs ) with the same name. So I wasn't sure which ones to pick for building the "big combined resourcefile" (which is what the tool for the other game does. (extract, pick the right ones, build it into a one big one)

Different md5sums? Damn. Usually when this happens the files are exactly the same. It's not so unusual from my understanding (in order not to have to change cds constantly), but devs almost always use the same file for all cds (because they developed the game in a hdd).

It's been a while, I only remember getting stuck on trying to figure out which extracted resources from which CD to use. It's doable if you are familiar with the game, I think.

Ok, for some reason, my cd 1 of RAMA is upper case but cd2 is lower case. So i first do a mass rename of cd2 to upper case:

find cd2 -depth -exec rename 's/(.*)\/([^\/]*)/$1\/\U$2/' {} \;

then a recursive diff

diff -rs CD1/AUDIO CD2/AUDIO

This shows that several files are identical, and several are only in each cd/audio. It doesn't show 'file x and file y differ' which is the terrible case. So far so good.
diff -rs CD1/AUDIO CD3/AUDIO and diff -rs CD2/AUDIO CD3/AUDIO are the same ( and don't even have matching files)

so next is videos (RBT extension i think) similar thing happens but they all share some files.

VMD dir, maybe another video format? Same thing.

So those dirs could be merged together if a mass uppercase or lowercase rename was done first i believe.

Other files are mentioned by unisci homepage:
RESMAP.0** files are supposed to be supported, RESSCI.0** too, but RAMA also has a RESMDT.0** which i've not seen mentioned, maybe it fails on this?

Theoretically i believe with this (if the interpreter doesn't check the cd volume label or something) this should be enough to 'trick' the game into reading a dir mounted with 'mount dir -t cdrom that is a merge of all 3 cds, but i'd prefer this was done right so we could go up to scummvm and say 'support this md5sum' and not have to depend on hacks like this on the DOSBox conf.

Haven't checked lighthouse yet.

there are a lot more contents. They are stored inside the ressci files. (which is like a zip file). I wrote a little program to extract the files from that and then ended up with a few files that are "double" when extracting all the ressci files of all the CDs. It's "just" a matter of determining which of the double files to be used and then "pack/zip" the files inside a one big ressci file.

At least that is what I remember. It's been a while since I looked at it and coded the things.

Well, i tried the mount d cddir -t cdrom -label "rama" trick (none of the other RES files has the same name) but it screwed up on cd change just by clicking the interview button. Dunno what kind of protection they're using but it can't be very good all things considered (i cracked QFGV myself by editing the executable with ollydbg to change a string from d:\dir to .\dir if i recall correctly...)

The way SCI resources are added to the main resource file leaves earlier versions within the file, but the latest is what the map file will point to. These earlier versions can be ignored or even deleted. Also, in a multi CD game any resources needed for that disc that are also needed by another disc are duplicated across those discs. These resources should be identical and should not matter which was preserved or which one the map file points to.

On another note, Brian Provinciano's old SCI Studio had a function to strip all of the older resources from the main resource files, leaving only the updated version of each.

Collector wrote:The way SCI resources are added to the main resource file leaves earlier versions within the file, but the latest is what the map file will point to. These earlier versions can be ignored or even deleted. Also, in a multi CD game any resources needed for that disc that are also needed by another disc are duplicated across those discs. These resources should be identical and should not matter which was preserved or which one the map file points to.

On another note, Brian Provinciano's old SCI Studio had a function to strip all of the older resources from the main resource files, leaving only the updated version of each.

Hmm, I was under the assumption that the map file was optional and that it would only speed up things, but I might have come to that conclusion based off the map being incomplete. Your reasoning/explanation would explain the map being incomplete as well. That might simplify things, as I extracted the resources while ignoring the map. I still have the extraction code somewhere. The index/map is rather simple as well, so I could modify my code to only extract things that are in the map.

the order that the interpreter looks for resources is first the game's base directory, the specified patches path(s) in the resource.cfg then where in the main resource volume that the map file points, which will be the most recent version of the resource. The original KQ4 and LSL2 only looked in the map file, but Sierra changed the interpreter to first look for patch files. The patch files are nothing more than updated resources that override what is in the main file. That way Sierra was able to release patches that only needed to be unpacked into the game's folder.

Note that early diskette based SCI games had multiple volumes, too, to span across multiple disks. This allowed the games to be played from the floppy drive. Again identical resources are found in more than one volume.

Sadly, Lighthouse the Dark being was just released by gog, and i bet they used the iso change of DOSBox, not the merge capability of unisci for it (like all other sierra gog releases). Maybe they'll update it and RAMA (if it gets released meanwhile) if the tool gets updated soon enough so that scummvm devs can be convinced to support the md5sums.

They probably used SVM for their release where all that is needed is to rename the volume files

SCO wrote:Sadly, Lighthouse the Dark being was just released by gog, and i bet they used the iso change of DOSBox, not the merge capability of unisci for it (like all other sierra gog releases). Maybe they'll update it and RAMA (if it gets released meanwhile) if the tool gets updated soon enough so that scummvm devs can be convinced to support the md5sums.

Collector wrote:They probably used SVM for their release where all that is needed is to rename the volume files

I just got Lighthouse from GOG. They are using ScummVM. I'm not really sure what either of you is talking about, but it looks like files have been extracted from the CDs. There are folders for "Movies" and "Robots" and no disc images as far as I can tell. The game runs fine in ScummVM, but what's strange is that I can't find the executable.