SCI11+ — SCI With Bits On

The BASE folder contains a cleaned-up version of the SCI11 interpreter source, ready to build. It has no extra features, only some warning-suppressing fixes and a lot of style changes. Oh, and no version stamp checks. The EXT folder contains my personal project, which takes the base version and adds a bunch of new features to it.

Included is a minimal copy of a very old MSVC, required to compile all this. To use this in DOSBox, mount SCI11 as C: and run GO.BAT. cd BASE or cd EXT, then simply run make and sit back. If all goes well you should end up with a SIERRA.EXE interpreter file. On a real MS-DOS machine, it's much the same as long as the directories match up.

You may want to edit INFO.C to taste.

The following interpreters are available. Invoke make <target> with one of the following:

• sierra: no debugger and no menu support.
• sci: debugger, still no menu support.
• sierram: no debugger, but menu support is in.
• scitestr: both debugger and menu are in.
• clean: don't build but remove all objects, map files, and binaries.

If no target is given, sierra is the default.

Hacks

The EXT version of SCI11 adds the following tricks:

• B800 text screen on exit (aka ENDOOM). Given a vocab resource #184 (get it?), the interpreter will plonk this into video memory on exit, like various games of yore. This vocab should be your standard 80x25 binary textmode screen, with the cursor locations to put any custom quit messages (SetQuitStr kernel call) and where to leave the command prompt afterwards. Also to make it a proper resource you must add two header bytes on top, 86 00. This feature can be easily toggled out by editing KAWA.H.
• Internalized error messages. Instead of having a separate INTERP.ERR file with all the error message text, these are all embedded to make for a cleaner directory. This feature can be easily toggled out by editing KAWA.H.
• Friendlier "Oops!" message. In a debug build, script errors give actually relatively helpful messages. In release builds, all you get is the confusingly-worded "Oops! You did something that we weren't expecting." and an error number. This often made the player think they'd messed up when "you" in fact referred to the programmer. We now take a compromise, showing an "Oops!" message that properly refers to the programmer and states the actual error. This feature can be easily toggled out by editing KAWA.H.
• A new kernel call so as to not piggy-back on others. The Kawa kernel call has various subcommands, all stupid and dumb except for one. Its name really depends on vocab 999. Numerically, it should go after DbugStr, as seen in KERNDISP.S. This cannot be removed entirely, but it can be dummied out by editing KAWA.H.
  • (Kawa 0 {text}): Show text in a DoAlert message for extra drama.
  • (Kawa 1 from to): Invert the specified range of the color palette. Za warudo!
  • (Kawa 2 back text): Sets the title bar colors for unskinned windows.
  • (Kawa 3): Returns 1 if this is a debug build, 2 if it has menu support, 3 if both.
• FileIO extensions. Several but not all SCI32 FileIO subcommands have been added for convenience. These can be toggled out by editing KAWA.H.
  • (FileIO 13 fd): Reads and returns a single byte from fd.
  • (FileIO 14 fd byte): Writes a single byte to fd.
  • (FileIO 15 fd): Reads and returns a two-byte word from fd.
  • (FileIO 16 fd word): Writes a word to fd.
• SCI2's Array kernel call. A bit of a work in progress. Like the Kawa kernel call, this can't be removed entirely but you can dummy it out by editing KAWA.H.
• Color hacks. Set a View object's scaleSignal to activate. If the top byte is $01, any non-transparent non-remap pixels will become black. If it's $02, they'll be remapped, and if it's set to $03, they'll be set to the first remap color. In other words, if you set up a remap to make color 253 darken by 25%, this color hack will either darken the entire view by 25%, or turn the view into one big translucent shadow.
• Button and edit controls respond to the back and color properties. Draw any button in any color without going full custom.
• Outlined text rendering. The Display kernel command now has a #stroke/dsSTROKE parameter that takes a bitfield specifying which of eight parts of an outline to draw around the text.
• Ensuring you're trying to run an SCI11 game by sniffing the format of the RESOURCE.MAP file. This feature can be easily toggled out by editing KAWA.H.
• DbugStr outputs to file instead of a secondary mono monitor. This feature can be easily toggled out by editing KAWA.H. New: You can specify which file in RESOURCE.CFG via the log setting. Also I forgot to mention it takes format strings.
• LDM/STM opcodes as needed by the hottest new shit in SCI Companion. If your copy of SCI Companion supports the derefence operator, you'll need these opcodes to use it. It's just a neater and faster alternative to the Memory kernel call.
• UTF-8 support. Font files have 16-bit character counts, and using UTF-8 encoding is the most backwards-compatible way to reach them all. Includes kernel calls equivalent to mbstowcs/wcstombs. This feature can be easily toggled out by editing KAWA.H.
• Colorful menus. Menus, if enabled, are drawn in whatever colors were last used by DrawStatus. This feature can be easily toggled out by editing KAWA.H.
• Full SBCS case mapping. If you don't enable UTF-8 support, you can specify a casemap file to use, with your choice of DOS-437, Win-1252, or ISO-8859-1.
• SCI32 font code rules. In SCI11, the |f..| and |c..| control codes you can use in text strings for display use lookup tables set up with the TextFonts and TextColors kernel calls, so |f2| uses the third entry of the font list. In SCI2, they set the font and color directly. In SCI11+, you can use both. |f2| uses the third entry of the font list, but |F2| uses font #2.
• Color 255 works in views. A logic bug prevents color #255 (usually pure white) from showing up in views — any color below 253 is considered "plain" instead of remapped, but they forgot to exclude 255, which ended up never drawn.
• Correct hex escapes in message text. You can use expressions like \x64 in message text to insert that character. But the programmers messed up while writing their own decoder and accidentally put 01234567890ABCDEF, with an extra zero, breaking most of the set you could insert that way. The fix can be easily toggled out by editing KAWA.H.
• Allow digits in stage directions. Message lines can contain stage directions in parenthesis, but these can only consist of letters. SCI32 also allowed numbers, and so does SCI11+. This feature can be easily toggled out by editing KAWA.H.
• Secure prev handling backported from SCI32 by lskovlun. This one's also in the BASE version.