Can anyone help me identify where in the Journey source code the graphics files are? Additional guidance on how (if at all) they could be edited would be awesome.
Thanks
Adam
Can anyone help me identify where in the Journey source code the graphics files are? Additional guidance on how (if at all) they could be edited would be awesome.
Thanks
Adam
The journey.d* files look like potential candidates for graphic resources. After examining the code, I noticed that tools called zglue and zsplit were being used on a working directory called “currpix”. The file journey.bwmac.1 also looks interesting. After some reading online I learned that the IBM version of Journey packaged graphics into a mg1 file which can be deconstructed using the ztools pix2gif executable. This historicalsource Journey code base looks like it might be from an apple development environment. I am wondering if the zglue / zsplit are tools for graphics management in the apple development environment, zsplit potentially being similar to pix2gif. Using pix2gif, I was able to deconstruct a Journey MG1 file and convert all the Journey images to gifs. Wondering if the apple tools might let us examine the *.d1 files.
Here is a link to the ztool I mentioned: Inform - ZMachine - Tools
Here is an example of what the pix2gif tool output:
The mg1 file for Journey is available here: Index: if-archive/infocom/media/mcga
Great work! Thank you! As I write this it’s Christmas Eve-Eve, so the next 3-4 days will be pretty busy ![]()
However, I want to pick up on this and get back involved when possible (might be next year now, given that next week is in fact next year!) ![]()
Again, much appreciated, and can’t wait to try this out and have a tinker myself. ![]()
Adam
Investigated the possibility that the historical archive may actually be an apple development snapshot. To do this, I went ahead and pulled an old Apple II Journey archive from ftp.apple.asimov.net. This is what I found out:
It is worth pointing out that the mg1 files are not present in the Journey archive on github; however, if you examine archives for other games with similar graphical implementations on: The Obsessively Complete Infocom Catalog, the mg1, d*, and cg1 files are present in the source directory. In particular the game Arthur is an interesting example. Version arthur-r74.zip includes mg1, cg1, and d* inside the source directory. It may be worthwhile to analyze this specific archive to understand more about the graphical implementation of these types of Infocom games.
A number of years have passed.
Has anyone figured out the bwmac file? I made a little bit of progress. It contains images, of about the right size for being the black and white Mac images for Journey. The container format is the same one that pix2gif extracts. pix2gif claims the images are 16 color, but pix2gif is unable to decompress the images within the container format (it hangs).
Each image in the container format starts with a six byte header:
xx xx xx yy yy yy
where xx xx xx is length of the data (following the header) given in MSb order. I don’t know what yy yy yy is. It seems to be some other data size like thing, also in MSb order, and it is about 5 times longer than the value in xx xx xx. (I tried modifying pix2gif to skip the header, but it still hangs.)
The data itself is compressed, but not always very well–sometimes it’s actually longer than an uncompressed black and white image of the right size.
Got it! The bwmac file is just the same as the pict.data file in the Masterpiece version, and can be decompressed using the code in decompress_amiga.cpp in Spatterlight.