The Colonel’s Bequest – Case Cracked (2020) | Hacker News Reader

The Colonel’s Bequest – Case Cracked (2020)

benshoof.org

83 pointshomarp13 comments

It warms my heart that to see this much excitement and community around arguably the most interesting adventure game of that era.

CB was also the motivation for my first “hack”: The game’s CGA driver was built custom to produce black and white graphics. I was gleeful to discover that copying a CGA driver from another contemporary SCI game produced reasonable four-color rendering.

Ha! Cool! I wasn't the only one!

But honestly, I eventually concluded that with the resolution available on my CGA monitor, the (slightly) higher-resolution black and white version was probably a better choice (and it gave the game a bit of a noir air).

I wish I would have had this special driver for the 16-color CGA mode (!) on the Amstrad PC1512 back then:

https://www.vogons.org/viewtopic.php?t=75497

What killed me is that I had an ATI Graphics Solution that could do Plantronics modes[1]. Even came with a demo disk showing off the glorious 16 colors. Took 30+ years but someone finally wrote a Sierra driver for it[2]!

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plantronics_Colorplus

[2] https://www.vogons.org/viewtopic.php?t=75877

We should probably both have gotten Amigas instead.

Then I couldn’t have split the 5.25” and 3.5” PC disks with my PS/2 owning schoolmate! (Yes, Mr. Look-at-me-with-VGA…)

I had a good hacking opportunity on this game as well - a chap named Ravi Iyengar made a General MIDI sound driver you could drop into these SCI0 games (apparently they all did MT-32, but none did General Midi, and the driver from the later engine games wouldn't work), but for Colonel's Bequest the game would hang at the end of the intro sequence due to some sort of callback telling the script code the music had finished playing, which I identified and provided a patch for.

Funny thing to reminisce on an afternoon 20 years ago, hacking on a driver to upgrade the sound in a game that was already by then ~14 years old which I'd played as a kid.

Funnier still that only six months back or so I replayed this game again, but not before patching my ScummVM with a custom palette that I thought suited the game a little better than the default garish EGA colors..

There's an excellent OneShortEye video on the subject, who cites this work.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U2budy3S3MA

Thé 75 to EB immediately screamed of copy protection. However , the other ramifications were unexpected, resulting in a very interesting read.

Congrats for finding this, and thanks for posting.

Such a hidden gem in Sierra's library. good whodunit mysteries are few and far between in the realm of video games.

Wow, impressive sleuthing!

My dad and I loved text adventures and Sierra-style games, so we actually bought this game legit and so never experienced the bugs in the cracked release.

It warms my heart to see New Orleans themed games that aren’t Gabriel Knight on Hacker News.

I always enjoy this sort of thing, especially regarding games from my childhood. Thanks, OP!

Reply on news.ycombinator.com