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New DREAMM beta this morning: https://aarongiles.com/dreamm/beta New in 2.1b14 ============= * Improve behavior when unexpected conditions occur in release builds * Cleanly exit on invalid memory accesses in non-Windows (or 16-bit Windows) games * Fixed some application-level crashes when games exit unexpectedly * Enabled 32-bit upgraders for Outlaws (2.0.1 and Direct3D) * Some progress (not working yet) on earlier Outlaws upgraders * Added back exact 1.5:1 aspect correction hack for Hercules (patterns are ugly otherwise)

For posterity I am answering my own question, there was indeed a BBS contest demo. Its the non-interactive demo that we already have. That demo that we have is unpacked, the original was in an installer file and came with README.TXT and CONTEST.TXT that explain the competition. Here they are: README.TXT: Thanks for downloading the Day of the Tentacle demo. This demo has voice and music for those of you with a Sound Blaster or SB compatible. Adlib users will be able to hear the music only. To run the demo just type "install". Follow the onscreen instructions You will need 535k free memory. A small help file is available by typing dottdemo help. Be sure to enter our demo related contest for a chance to win this zany new game. CONTEST.TXT APRIL 15, 1993 "Read my suction cup . . . no more taxes!" Are you forking hard earned cash over to Uncle Sam? Elect Purple Tentacle ruler of the world, and never pay taxes again. After all, when tentacles come into power and humans are kept as pets, you'll never have to file another 1040 form (of course, you'll also be forced to sleep in a cage and do stupid pet tricks at human shows). Is this the warped ranting of a crazed, power-hungry politico? NO! It's the warped ranting of LucasArts Entertainment Company announcing its newest game, Day of the Tentacleª. This sequel to Maniac Mansion¨ is a wacky, interactive cartoon comedy in which you must stop tentacles from taking over the world. Controlling three off-the-wall kids (who wind up in three different time periods), you scramble to turn back time and prevent tentacle takeover. The IBM CD-ROM "Enhanced Edition" featuring the voices of professional actors throughout the game and the IBM disk-based version with a "talkie" introduction will be available this summer. CURIOUS??? Take a look at the Day of the Tentacle demo. Want to GET SOMETHING FOR NOTHING when the government is sucking every penny out of you? Enter the Day of the Tentacle drawing and qualify to win a FREE Day of the Tentacle game. Here are the details: Answer the following three questions about the Day of the Tentacle demo correctly, and qualify for a drawing to win a free game: 1) Tentacles come in TWO designer colors. What are they? 2) Drinking toxic waste can make you . . . (a) Greener, more radioactive, (b) Smarter, more aggressive, (c) Deader, more inactive 3) Green Tentacle asks for what from Bernard, Laverne and Hoagie? (a) help, (b) money, (c) respect Mail your answers, along with your name, address and phone number to Green Tentacle, P.O. Box 10307, San Rafael, CA, 94912. No calls will be accepted. Deadline for entering is June 1, 1993. IMPORTANT: WRITE THE NAME OF THE BBS FROM WHICH YOU DOWNLOADED THE CONTEST ON THE OUTSIDE OF YOUR ENVELOPE. The drawing will run for 8 weeks, so you have 8 chances to win a free game (LucasArts will accumulate entries until the end of the contest). Winners will receive their games 3 to 4 weeks after the product's release this summer. Green Tentacle will contact winners by mail. ALL entrants will get a FREE Day of the Tentacle hint book and FREE shipping and handling WITH purchase of Day of the Tentacle ($59.95 for floppy or CD-ROM version) DIRECT from LucasArts. You can do this two ways: 1) Send a check for $59.95 with your contest entry, and specify which format you want ("CD" or "floppy"). LucasArts will pre- order the game for you, and send it to you with a free hintbook and no shipping or handling charge. REMEMBER -- the game releases this summer, and you can expect to receive it in the mail 3 to 4 weeks after it releases. OR, 2) Call 1-800-STARWARS 1 to 2 weeks after you enter the drawing (gives LucasArts time to process your entry), and let LucasArts know you entered the Day of the Tentacle contest. Pre-order the game with your Visa or Mastercard, and when it comes in we'll send it to you with a free hint book and no shipping or handling charge. If you win a free game after you send LucasArts a check, we'll refund your money or not charge your credit card. IMPORTANT: To receive the free hint book and free shipping and handling, you must order the game by August 1, 1993. TAKE NOTE: No purchase necessary to enter. Only one entry per person, please. Winners consent to the use of the their name for promotional purposes. LucasArts Entertainment Company is not responsible for lost or misguided entries. Illegible entries will be disqualified. Employees of LucasArts Entertainment Company, Lucas Digital Ltd. and Lucasfilm Ltd. and their families are not eligible to enter.

Hi folks. A few weeks ago I started working on a spare time project: a complete collection of all the background art from every LucasArts adventure game (Maniac thru EMI), in palettized PNG format and in its original resolution and aspect ratio. My ultimate goal is to upload this to archive.org, but since they don't seem to support editing the actual data contents of collections once you've uploaded them, I want to make sure I get things right before I do so. So I thought I'd present my work so far to some adventure game experts. Here's a dump of the data on my personal website - as the page says, please do not link this page anywhere; I do not intend to host these files indefinitely and intend to take them down once the collection is completed and uploaded: [link redacted for now] The presentation on that page is also temp, it's just the quickest easiest way I found to provide access to all the data. I'll let the draft readme on that page speak for itself - see the sections on "presentation of the work". To be very clear, these aren't raw dumps from a ripping program, though ripped data was the starting point for most of the images, I've edited these images (some quite extensively, eg the runtime-generated maze rooms in some games) to get them as close to how they look in-game as possible, minus most of the characters, obviously - the idea is to foreground and celebrate the art, and the artists who created it. Stuff I'm looking for feedback on: Any artist credits I missed or got wrong in the draft readme. Any glitches in the images, ie places where I didn't patch in an object correctly, something is missing, etc. Anything I missed? ie entire rooms I forgot, etc. In the interests of not flooding the collection hundreds of very similar images, I didn't include every maze room as those are cobbled together from pieces, but I tried to represent most or all of said pieces in a smaller number of "iconic" room images. Filenames - my naming convention was arbitrary and probably inconsistent in several places. Also I may have simply gotten the name or purpose of a room wrong. I didn't replay all these games while working on this, but I did jump in and out of ScummVM a ton to check my work. I will probably rename all the files to move from snake_case to regular human filenames with capitalization and spaces. Any quality improvement suggestions, eg better versions of the existing images. Stuff I can't figure out: How to get accurate palette shifts for the rooms in Zak FM Towns that use them, eg the jungle mazes, the Blue Crystal / Yellow Crystal / Mars Ankh / Mars Teleporter room, and the Egypt / Mars sarcophagus rooms. These rooms were all authored in one palette each, with SCUMM code (RoomColor?) setting the palette shift appropriately for each variation. But I can't figure out how to get those shifted palettes and map the images to them. It was easy to do this with Zak C64 and EGA because it's only 16 colors and it was trivial to just eyeball em... not so much with several different arbitrary 256 color palettes.

Sea of Thieves. Maybe there's a better overhead angle to get, but I didn't have much luck climbing.

One of the all-time great pieces of framing, that scene. The way it pans in as you walk down.

A basic example of that here https://skynetde.github.io/scummvm-shader-comparison/

Sounds like something that could be done on Mojo maybe? In the past we have talked about doing things like that for the games database.

I agree, the ideal presentation would be in the form of a more elaborate website or app. I'm thinking of features like thumbnails and light box view, but also the ability to zoom into the images, switch between different versions of the same background, toggle aspect ratio correction, maybe simulating a CRT screen, etc. Edit: Ah, screw it, I converted them all. Acrobat created a bookmark for each page, named after the file, so those names are still intact as well. https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1C3v3cQNGdU6qgElSDKxen5OeU1OtGUNF?usp=sharing

New DREAMM beta release: https://aarongiles.com/dreamm/beta New in 2.1b13 ============= * Updated documentation: https://aarongiles.com/dreamm/docs/v21 * Fixed potential crash when rendering unsupported glyphs in the UI * Added support for ZIP's "implode" (mode 6) algorithm * Fixed handling of ZIP files with missing size/CRC data in local header * Added telemetry opt-in/opt-out links in about box