-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 jens persson wrote: > Hello, > > What I found strange and RC, (but haven't acted upon yet) is that I > could not find any source. the upstream package just contains binary > file (queen.1c for Flight of the Amazon Queen) that is copied into the > package. I haven't looked into scummvm if there is a tool to decompile > the game into something more sutable for change.
I asked the ScummVM developers via IRC about the source of the two "freeware" games (for my own curiosity; IANADD), and they provided much useful information: * The sources for the original game programs are not going to be released, but the original game programs are not needed to run the games with ScummVM. * The sources for the game scripts are no longer available, even to the original game developers. However, the format of these scripts are specified by the ScummVM source. Based on this, they could be decompiled, changed, and recompiled, by writing tools to do so. * The other resources are already in a suitable format for modification, except for being part of a disk image. There are tools to extract the resources from the image, such as queenrebuild. The formats of the resources are specified by the ScummVM source. For more information, see the #scummvm IRC log at: http://logs.scummvm.org/scummvm.log.25Jun2004 Grep for JoshTriplett to find the relevant discussion. Based on this information, I would say that other than being packed into a game image, the data is already in a format usable for modification; this format is well-specified by the Free code in ScummVM that uses it. The game data could be extracted, modified, and recompiled, if someone wanted to modify it. That's not exactly ideal, but many other old emulated programs are in the same situation: no source is available anymore, and there are enough people around that don't need source to modify them, so what's available should be considered the source. I believe that there was previous discussion debian-legal about this issue, and the conclusion was that if a given format is the _only_ format available, even to the original developers, then it must be the preferred form for modification. - - Josh Triplett -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v1.2.4 (GNU/Linux) Comment: Using GnuPG with Debian - http://enigmail.mozdev.org iD8DBQFA3HAQGJuZRtD+evsRAjr/AJ0QxdzpE1ou5WModqlhs61aEIse6ACgmr6I k39orRb+ZvuaLtoFiNwmGk4= =vvN1 -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----
