DREAMM 2.0 beta

[Aaron Giles]

Hi all,

 

It's been a long time coming, but I'm finally ready to open up broader testing of DREAMM 2.0.

 

Grab the latest beta here: https://aarongiles.com/dreamm/beta/

 

This release supports both Windows and MacOS (Catalina+), and both x86 and ARM64 architectures.

 

Compared to 1.0, this release adds:

• Support for GRiME games (Grim Fandango, Escape from Monkey Island)
• Support for Afterlife and several mid-90s Star Wars games: Dark Forces, Rebel Assault I/II, X-Wing, and TIE Fighter
• Support for Windows releases of SCUMM games (including my own ports plus DIG95)
• A new frontend and in-game UI (accessible via Alt+M)
• Better support for GOG releases and special installers
• Faster x86 emulation core
• Improved VGA emulation, including SVGA
• Basic joystick support

 

Feel free to report issues in this thread, or directly to me at dreamm@aarongiles.com

 

[Aaron Giles]

Just posted DREAMM 2.0b9 with a bunch of fixes. Thanks for the feedback so far!

 

Release: https://aarongiles.com/dreamm/beta/

Readme: https://aarongiles.com/dreamm/releases/dreamm-2.0b9-readme.txt

 

Changes since 2.0b8
===================
* Frontend can now toggle fullscreen and grow/shrink via Alt+Plus/Minus
* Window position saved independently for frontend/games
* Added support for ZIP files; use ZIP for files internally
* Fixed detection of Dark Forces and Monkey Island CD variants
* Added many new variants reported by users
* Fix missing pixels at bottom in aspect ratio corrected modes
* Fixed crash with bad CUE files
* Show active SDL version in about box
* MacOS: Fix about box crash
* MacOS: Fix hang when using Cmd-Q
* MacOS: Update to SDL 2.26.2
* ARM64: Fix crash in FXAM opcode (hit in Escape from Monkey Island)

[Blondebeard]

Thanks Aaron! The random crash on macOS while picking up objects in Escape from Monkey Island seems fixed

 

I did notice that I now have too many variants of The Secret of Monkey Island

I did add the folder with all the games again with b9. It seems some got duplicated. Maybe it's because I added those with different versions of Dreamm?  I will try deleting the DREAM folder with the data files and adding the games again to see if the problem is solved.

Edited January 23, 2023 by Blondebeard

[Aaron Giles]

3 hours ago, Blondebeard said:

I did notice that I now have too many variants of The Secret of Monkey Island

Hmmm, it shouldn't be accumulating like that. It adds the number when it doesn't think it has an exact match to a known game. I think there's a bug lurking there.

 

[Blondebeard]

17 hours ago, Aaron Giles said:

Hmmm, it shouldn't be accumulating like that. It adds the number when it doesn't think it has an exact match to a known game. I think there's a bug lurking there.

 

Deleting the install folder and re-adding the games seems to have fixed the issue.

[Aaron Giles]

22 hours ago, Blondebeard said:

Deleting the install folder and re-adding the games seems to have fixed the issue.

Except you're still seeing the [3] getting added after the name, which it's not supposed to do unless you're installing an unrecognized version of a game. Maybe you are?

[Blondebeard]

5 hours ago, Aaron Giles said:

Except you're still seeing the [3] getting added after the name, which it's not supposed to do unless you're installing an unrecognized version of a game. Maybe you are?

I do have two EGA versions. One came with the Monkey Island Anthology (8x3.5"). Not sure where I got the other one.

[Udvarnoky]

EMI is a night and day difference on my machine with the latest beta. Acknowledged issues with some of the water effects aside, I got through the whole first half without any weirdness [that isn’t inherit to the game]. It took until the LUA Bar for me to hit a problem – for the puzzle where you have to meddle with the boat system to get the chef out of the kitchen, he gets stuck in front of the little bridge, blocking my way. I seem to vaguely recall that the potential for an NPC’s route to get foiled by an obstacle was always a thing in EMI, but in DREAMM this situation happened consistently. It would have blocked me from any further progress, but I was eventually able to brute force my way past the chef, somehow. After finishing the second Melee Island segment, the game crashed on me upon reaching Jambalaya Island on the map. A bunch of reloads confirmed that it happens ten times out of ten, so that was it for EMI. I don’t know if it has any relevance, but this was the disc-switching moment of the game back in the day.

I decided to keep things GrimE-y and turned to Grim Fandango next. This was my first time playing the as-shipped-in-1998 version of the game since the Remaster came out, so I had some nostalgic fights with those elevators. DREAMM, though, seems to emulate the game near flawlessly. The one significant issue I encountered was a strange one. The original Grim automatically resumes you when you relaunch the game, and this feature is messed up -- it restores Manny geographically where I left him, but his inventory is wiped (just the scythe) and the game otherwise seems to have no awareness of my progress, complete with dialog trees being reset. It’s as if the only part of the game’s state that got remembered was the location, and in all other respects its awareness reverts back to the start. When I manually reload my actual saved game, all is well. I only picked up on a single visual glitch: Jepito’s lantern not being illuminated during the scene where you meet him underwater. That was all. Got through it start to finish. Any other rickety stuff I observed was all the same stuff I recall it having shipped with, complete with the legendary “can’t talk to Domino in Year 3” bug.

This is a very stable beta. I encourage anyone with some free time to check it out with some of the newly supported games.

[Aaron Giles]

Thanks for the testing and great feedback!

 

I'm hot on the trail of the water effects bugs, and have fixed the crasher on disk switch for the next beta. Basically, they were tearing everything down and then restarting it all after the disc switch, and there was a bug lurking on the teardown path. I'm hoping next time you'll be able to finish EMI. I'm pretty stumped on why the cook can't get over the bridge in the restaurant, but have some ideas for how to figure it out.

 

As for the Grim inventory issue, that's very odd, and tops to look at once I get EMI working a bit more solidly.

[Aaron Giles]

Late night release of DREAMM 2.0b10!

 

https://aarongiles.com/dreamm/beta/

 

Changes since 2.0b9
===================
* Added more game variants
* Added proper 3D clipping to fix shadows and water effects in EFMI
* Fixed crash at EFMI disc switch point

* Improved exception handling from assembly emulation cores
* Minimal support for Windows structured exception generation
* Fixed bad behavior when double-playing a sound buffer (might help EFMI delays)
* Disabled code that might have enabled floating-point exceptions on Intel machines
* Fixed twitchy screen resolution handling in some FM Towns games
* MacOS: Fixed handling of files with trailing periods
* MacOS: Prettified the DMG

Edited January 28, 2023 by Aaron Giles

[Blondebeard]

4 hours ago, Aaron Giles said:

Late night release of DREAMM 2.0b10!

 

https://aarongiles.com/dreamm/beta/

 

Changes since 2.0b9
===================
* Added more game variants
* Added proper 3D clipping to fix shadows and water effects in EFMI
* Improved exception handling from assembly emulation cores
* Minimal support for Windows structured exception generation
* Fixed bad behavior when double-playing a sound buffer (might help EFMI delays)
* Disabled code that might have enabled floating-point exceptions on Intel machines
* Fixed twitchy screen resolution handling in some FM Towns games
* MacOS: Fixed handling of files with trailing periods
* MacOS: Prettified the DMG

Big improvements with this version for EFMI. The audio is no longer delayed and the water effects are working perfectly!! No crashes during my short play. The only remaining issue is the music not playing, the only exception is the menu.

 

As for MI1&2, I’m still having the variants issue. It seems that some variants are added/installed again every time I drag their folder.

 

Monkey Island 1 variants:

Monkey Island 2 variants:

Edited January 28, 2023 by Blondebeard

[AndywinXp]

Thanks Aaron for your hard work, this update successfully fixed the multilanguage version of MI1! 

 

I did notice (in 2.0 but IIRC not in 1.0) that using the aspect ratio correction messes up the ratio between the vertical mouse cursor speed and the horizontal one, while on Dosbox the cursor movement is as fast on the Y axis as it is on the X axis.

 

I'm guessing that this could very well be intentional though, as stretching a screen with respect to one of the two axes would by definition also stretch the perception of the mouse cursor movement. 🙂

[Aaron Giles]

3 hours ago, Blondebeard said:

Big improvements with this version for EFMI. The audio is no longer delayed and the water effects are working perfectly!! No crashes during my short play. The only remaining issue is the music not playing, the only exception is the menu.

Glad to hear it! (Well, mostly.) I've never had any problems with the music. Can you elaborate on what's going on with the music for you? I don't quite understand where it's missing.

 

Also, can you tell me about your system? (Mac/Windows? What OS? Are you running from an SSD or a spinning disk?)

 

3 hours ago, Blondebeard said:

As for MI1&2, I’m still having the variants issue. It seems that some variants are added/installed again every time I drag their folder.

I haven't looked into that yet. Hopefully for the next one!

 

1 hour ago, AndywinXp said:

I did notice (in 2.0 but IIRC not in 1.0) that using the aspect ratio correction messes up the ratio between the vertical mouse cursor speed and the horizontal one, while on Dosbox the cursor movement is as fast on the Y axis as it is on the X axis.

In the adventure games this shouldn't be any different than before, because the mouse cursor tracks with the real position of the mouse cursor on your system's screen. If you change aspect ratio, then the displayed area gets bigger/smaller, and the real position of your mouse will track along with it. This is most noticeable in windowed mode, where you can move the mouse pointer in/out of the window smoothly, but it also applied in full screen mode.

 

DOSBox captures the mouse pointer and reports "raw" values to the game, so it makes sense that it would behave differently. I was aiming for cleaner integration with your host machine.

Edited January 28, 2023 by Aaron Giles

[Blondebeard]

46 minutes ago, Aaron Giles said:

Glad to hear it! (Well, mostly.) I've never had any problems with the music. Can you elaborate on what's going on with the music for you? I don't quite understand where it's missing.

 

Also, can you tell me about your system? (Mac/Windows? What OS? Are you running from an SSD or a spinning disk?)

Sorry, should have been more clear on my description. The music doesn’t play at all through out the game with two exceptions: cutscenes and options menu (pressing F1). The sounds effects and voices work everywhere though. I have a Macbook Air M1 (2020) with Ventura 12.2 (SSD).

[Aaron Giles]

13 minutes ago, Blondebeard said:

Sorry, should have been more clear on my description. The music doesn’t play at all through out the game with two exceptions: cutscenes and options menu (pressing F1). The sounds effects and voices work everywhere though. I have a Macbook Air M1 (2020) with Ventura 12.2 (SSD).

On my Mac Mini M1 it's playing fine, so we need to figure out what's different.

 

Exactly which version of EFMI are you running? (Go in-game and then use Alt+M to bring up menus and show the about box - it will tell you which version.)

 

I presume you've fiddled with the options in the F1 menu to adjust the music volume and they have no effect. Have you gone into "Alter Gee-Whiz Effects" and tried changing the music quality?

 

I'm guessing either the music files got installed badly or there's some non-obvious configuration value that's turned off your music. Would like to get to the bottom of this.

 

Worst case, maybe try re-installing the game and deleting the game data (back up your saves though!) to see if it comes back?

[Blondebeard]

6 minutes ago, Aaron Giles said:

Exactly which version of EFMI are you running? (Go in-game and then use Alt+M to bring up menus and show the about box - it will tell you which version.)

Running Escape from Monkey Island - v1.0, English. The game was installed from two ISOs (one for each CD).

 

 

7 minutes ago, Aaron Giles said:

I presume you've fiddled with the options in the F1 menu to adjust the music volume and they have no effect. Have you gone into "Alter Gee-Whiz Effects" and tried changing the music quality?

Yes, changing the volume only affects the music playing while the menu is open (only place where it plays apart from the cutscenes). I tried changing to minimal, but the music still still didn’t play elsewhere.

 

11 minutes ago, Aaron Giles said:

I'm guessing either the music files got installed badly or there's some non-obvious configuration value that's turned off your music. Would like to get to the bottom of this.

I can try extracting the files from the ISO and play it via ScummVM and check if there’s a problem with the music files, but I’m pretty sure I played it in the past. Let me know if that is worth checking.

 

12 minutes ago, Aaron Giles said:

Worst case, maybe try re-installing the game and deleting the game data (back up your saves though!) to see if it comes back?

I did that, but the music still doesn’t play.

[Blondebeard]

Good news, tested EFMI with ScummVM using the same ISOs and I had exactly the same issue so it must be the ISO/files and not DREAMM  Ignore that! It seems I was not copying the files inside the “Texture” folder correctly for ScummVM to play the music. It now works fine on ScummVM.

 

Could it be related with FullMonkeyMap.imt? For ScummVm I had to use that file from both CDs and rename it to “FullMonkeyMap1.imt” (CD1) and “FullMonkeyMap2.imt” (CD2), but I noticed DREAMM only has “FullMonkeyMap.imt“ in the Install folder.

Edited January 28, 2023 by Blondebeard

[Udvarnoky]

I was able to pick up EMI where I left off with the latest beta. Just finished the game. All water issues were fixed from what I could tell as well. I noticed only two minor things along the way:

 

-Every time you perform a dive in the diving contest, there's a little scene where Guybrush walks back to the judges to see his scores. He gets briefly stuck along the way, every time. It only lasts a second or two, and he is always able to press on, but maybe whatever's causing this negligible issue relates to the one stalemating the chef in the LUA Bar.

-In Monkey Kombat, some of the banana overlays representing health would occasionally linger behind when damage was taken. So for example, if three bananas were supposed to have been lost on a hit, you might only see the second and third of those actually disappear, creating a gap.

 

That was all. Good stuff!

[Aaron Giles]

5 hours ago, Blondebeard said:

Running Escape from Monkey Island - v1.0, English. The game was installed from two ISOs (one for each CD).

Hmmm, I've tried that exact setup and v1.1 and get music with both, so that's not the issue.

 

3 hours ago, Blondebeard said:

Could it be related with FullMonkeyMap.imt? For ScummVm I had to use that file from both CDs and rename it to “FullMonkeyMap1.imt” (CD1) and “FullMonkeyMap2.imt” (CD2), but I noticed DREAMM only has “FullMonkeyMap.imt“ in the Install folder

Interesting, I've never had to do that. It's gotta be something else, but I'm struggling to guess what it is.

 

Just as a sanity check can you verify your install folder looks like the attached?

null

Also, if you look in the gamedata folder, can you copy/paste the contents of your "Program Files/LucasArts/Monkey 4/saves/emfi.cfg" file? (It's just a text file.)

[Blondebeard]

49 minutes ago, Aaron Giles said:

Just as a sanity check can you verify your install folder looks like the attached?

Looks similar to mine. The only difference I spot is the "FullMonkeyMap.imt". Mine is 5 KB, yours 6 KB.

 

emi.cfg from the gamedata folder:

textspeed:7
joystick_enabled:1
camera_mode:0
last_save:Saves/efmi001.gsv
shadowfx:2
musvolume:96
speech_mode:2
subtitles:0
moviequality:0
vocvolume:100
vocfx:1
sfxvolume:100
miscfx:2
musicquality:0
gamma:1
analog_mode:0

 

Edited January 29, 2023 by Blondebeard

[Benny]

My guess is that FullMonkeyMap is the issue.

From memory, I think the files are named the same on both cd's but have different contents.

ScummVM makes you rename the files from both cd's and uses both.  If someone patches it to make it work without the cd's then they also need to patch the FullMonkeyMap file (I don't have the gog version but I'm guessing this is what they've done in it).

 

In my EMI Launcher program as part of the nocd patch I add this to 'Textures\FullMonkeyMap.imt'. I'm on a different computer right now so I cant check but I'm guessing its the contents of FullMonkeyMap from cd 2.

 

https://github.com/bgbennyboy/Escape-From-Monkey-Island-Setup-and-Launcher/blob/master/EMI Launcher/uEMIConst.pas#L114

 

 

[Aaron Giles]

On 1/29/2023 at 6:52 AM, Bennyboy said:

My guess is that FullMonkeyMap is the issue.

Well there's certainly a quick way to check. If you're correct (and I'm starting to suspect you are), it looks like Blondbeard's FullMonkeyMap is the one from CD2. Blondbeard, if you copy the file MonkeyData\Textures\FullMonkeyMap.imt from CD #1 over top of the one you have, do you get music at the beginning?

 

Obviously, I need a way to stitch together the two files (which dovetails into another feature I was planning anyways), but for now that would at least get you music in the first half (and confirm our theory).

[Blondebeard]

9 minutes ago, Aaron Giles said:

Blondbeard, if you copy the file MonkeyData\Textures\FullMonkeyMap.imt from CD #1 over top of the one you have, do you get music at the beginning?

That did the trick! I now get music and our theory is confirmed 

[Aaron Giles]

All right, I had to do some pretty significant rejiggering to make it work, but in the future if you install from CD images it will pick up and combine the two FullMonkeyMap files. Thanks for hanging in there while we sorted this confusing behavior out!

[Aaron Giles]

DREAMM 2.0b11 posted here:

https://aarongiles.com/dreamm/beta/

 

Main changes are fixing all known Escape from Monkey Island issues, and improvements to the installation/identification process.

I have a pile of new variants to sort through, so next release will focus on those, plus knocking out as many bugs as I can!

 

Blondebeard, this version should stop creating separate entries each time you install a game. However, it will not recognize your previous numbered installs, so you might want to delete those before proceeding.

 

Changes since 2.0b10
====================
* Win32/Direct3D: Fix FPU rounding mode handling
* Win32/Direct3D: Add stronger clamping of iterated parameters to prevent artifacts
* Win32/Direct3D: Support multiple threads for 3D rendering (defaults to 2)
* Win32/DirectDraw: Frame-limit to 60fps
* Win32: Fix crash when attempting to free system libraries on MacOS
* Frontend: Fix installation of EFMI from CDs, which requires combining two files (please reinstall)
* Frontend: Improved handling of game scanning/verification; unknown game versions now have a CRC code
   (note: old unknown game versions will not be detected; you'll want to clean those out)
* I386: Support 0-overhead opcode hooks and reduce static table sizes (smaller executable)
* General: Default to SoundBlaster for games even if MT32/GMIDI is available since it's more consistent
* General: Disabled most all debugging features in release build; lots of internal cleanup