I’ve been spending too much time this weekend improving Bocfel’s support of Infocom’s graphical games. While doing so I ran across an obscure little issue in Journey that I’d not heard of before.
Journey, like the other graphical games, makes some use of the interpreter number to determine how to act. In this particular case, it tries to figure out how to draw a black room to indicate darkness (specifically at the Gate to the Plains). How it does so is kind of interesting: in all interpreters except DOS, it gives the “room” window—the one on the upper left—a black background (it calls the relevant flag BLACK-PICTURE-BORDER). When the room image is drawn, it’s a bit smaller than the window, so the black background creates a black border around the image.
When it’s time to show the dark room, all it does is clear the window, leaving the black behind. So no specific image of darkness, just a black window.
But if you’re on DOS, it instead draws the room image G-BLACK, which is 59. That is nominally a picture the size of other rooms that gets drawn on top of the (not-black) window. Except that the DOS MCGA graphics (and thus the Blorb files) do not contain picture 59! This is almost surely an accidental omission: the EGA graphics do contain picture 59. The CGA graphics don’t, but that’s because CGA’s background is known to be black, so it’d be pointless. To support the idea that this was an accidental omission, Arthur also has a black room, and both the EGA and MCGA do contain it (167).
I’ll show images from CGA, EGA, and MCGA to illustrate what’s going on:
It doesn’t even necessarily look wrong; the blank window could easily be taken to be intentional. But it seems like it probably wasn’t.
For reference, a normal room looks like this:
