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Posted Sat, Dec 29, 2007 at 12:12pm by ScottTagged: games, programming
[[img|/images/gallery/4/62_med.jpg||float=left]] How many people remember the game The 7th Guest? One of the original CD-ROM based games, it was filled with rather devious puzzles and featured full motion video.
Although a windows executable was developed for the game, it was originally written for DOS and neither run particularly well under XP or Vista. Due to this minor issue, I decided to attempt to learn C# by trying out the idea of a making a full windows compatible version. With the help of the Xentax and Multimedia wiki's, I am now able to read in any GJD file (the large ones on the CDs) with help from the RL file (small ones installed to the hard disk) to play any of the in-game animation sequences.
Unfortunately I currently am not getting too great a performance from using either the SDL (via SdlDotNet) or XNA library when trying to play the video sequences which involve palette changes (eg, whenever the camera moves within a room) while the FMV sequences play with ~20 to 30% CPU usage.
Comments
How are you getting on? Did you ever manage to solve your performance issues? I've not had a chance to work much on mine recently. I occasionally open the exe up in IDA, but I think it's gonna need more dedicated time than I have to give atm! (i tried to find your email address but couldn't: feel free to reply to this by email)
Posted Thu, Jan 24, 2008 at 9:27am by spookypeanut
Whoops - didn't even realise I'd received a comment! I've temporarily shelved the graphics display part although I went digging through the script.grv file to see what I could find last weekend. <br />
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* Goes off looking through the database to find email address *
Posted Tue, Jan 29, 2008 at 3:28pm by Scott