Journey - Graphics Files

Authoring General Design Discussions
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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

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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: https://inform-fiction.org/zmachine/ztools.html

Here is an example of what the pix2gif tool output:

pix014

The mg1 file for Journey is available here: https://ifarchive.org/indexes/if-archive/infocom/media/mcga/

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Great work! Thank you! As I write this it’s Christmas Eve-Eve, so the next 3-4 days will be pretty busy :stuck_out_tongue:

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!) :slightly_smiling_face:

Again, much appreciated, and can’t wait to try this out and have a tinker myself. :+1:

Adam

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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:

  1. There are five total disks in the Apple II Journey release. This seems to match the journey.d1, journey.d2, journey.d3, journey.d4, and journey.d5 files present in the historical source archive.
  2. After using a few tools to extract the contents of the first Journey Apple diskette I found that a journey.d1 file exists on the root of the Apple diskette.
  3. Extracted the journey.d1 from the Apple diskette and ran a checksum on the binary data and then did the same to the journey.d1 present in the historical archive. The binary checksums matched exactly.

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.

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