News

May 1, 2002 - It's Like a Soap Opera...
I guess noone will be reading this, since there's been lots of minor updates (to fix errors etc.) without any news update, but here goes...

Yes, I, Serge, am back from the dead. If you follow the LEC fan community in general, you'll know I have been for over half a year. Not working on SCUMM Revisited, though. For now. SCUMM Revisited 3 was released in an un-supported pre-alpha over at LucasHacks! - limited functionality, only a bit of new stuff to be ripped (such as many of the CMI costumes, all Grim Fandango backgrounds etc.), none of the old stuff works. And it has bugs.

However, there's new stuff coming up any moment. No new utilities yet, but a lot of plans for ones - and I have started development of some of them. They're to be known as The SCUMMBag Family. More about them at the new forum (I can't be bothered to put a link here, just click the damn "Forum" button on the right ;). Also, I hope a lot more will be using the more visible, more accessible, new forum. That's all for now.

October 8, 2000 - An Early Hello:
Just felt like fixing the site to work after mixnmojo's server change, and thus caused the main page to claim it was updated. Anyway, good news might be coming someday soon, a tiny surprise, but who knows, I might reconsider. So, while waiting to see what it is, I'll just encourage you to go check out, test and use/abuse the forum, which is finally up and working again. Oh, I also made a "minor" fix to the images article. Seems I was a bit too quick entering the specs for each codec. It should be fixed now. Thanks to NeverMore! :)

July 26, 2000 - A Late Farewell:
Yes, this will probably be the last update ever from me, and it's not much of an update... Due to private life taking over most of my time, I have neither the time nor the desire to keep on making SCUMM Revisited. I have closed my own web access, which means that I have rarely been online since March. This also means that I have not answered the (literally, if bytes could be weighed) tons of mail with questions, requests and comments that I have had since then. Sorry about that, but there's nothing I can do about it, really. I've read it all, I can assure you, but I have no way of replying (in the 60 minutes I'm usually on) to the 50-80 SCUMM Revisited related mails I see each of the rare times that I log on. I have private mail to respond to too. I hope you'll all forgive me :) If you won't, I must admit I don't much care ;). Adding to this, my entire sources for SCUMM Revisited 3 were lost recently in a harddisk crash (real men don't make backups - and cry when they lose the data), and thus, no, you'll never get SCUMM Revisited 3. A few questions to be answered before closing:

Will you never be back?
It is not unlikely that sometime in the not so immediate future, I might return to doing some of this stuff, but right now, the time is simply not there.

Can't you release the source?
One of the reasons that I rewrote SCUMM Revisited 2 entirely was that in spite of my efforts to make the source structured and object oriented, even I couldn't figure it out when going back to it after a few weeks. A lot of the findings can be found in the specs section, and it's not impossible that sometime I'll release some stuff on the audio compression. As for script decompilation, costume decompression and video decryption, others (the ones I worked with on this stuff) know as much as I do. I leave the release of that as an exercise for the involved parts ;). I do have the sources for 2.0.11 still, but asking me for it will NOT help it get out. It gets out if I ever decide to release it. If it never does get out, hey, I figured it out. How hard can it be, huh?

Do you know any LucasArts people? Did LEC kill you? What's the Secret of Monkey Island?(tm)
People have been spreading rumours about me all over the web and on IRC. You wouldn't believe what's been said. Sometimes I'm Ron Gilbert, other times I've been killed by assasins paid by LEC. I guess it's mostly my own fault, because I've always been very secretive about my private life to everyone but my closest friends. So let's get the facts straight, better now than never:

I'm a Dane (that means I'm from Denmark), I'm now 22 years old, and my real name is Jimmi Thøgersen (that should be no secret if you look around you...). Yes, I do know a few important people who have worked at LucasArts, and no, I'll never tell you who. I'm still alive, probably now more than ever. And as for the Secret of Monkey Island. Well, the Secret is that it's a secret (no, noone at LEC told me that, don't worry :).

A few links for you people who just can't get enough. Matt Shaw told me that something about SCUMM Revisited is here:

Yes, HERE

... but I haven't checked it out yet, and it may be gone by now.

Anyone who can't get enough of my work, should of course look at the Other Stuff From My Less Than Sane Mind part of the links. None of that will probably ever be updated by me either, but SCRAMM seems to live on :)

So, that's it. It's been a wonderful 1 1/2 year wasted ;) and I have a lot of people to thank, but most of them are already thanked on the... Thanks page... So, I'll skip that. The forum may live on, but don't expect me to look at it every day or even every week. And this site may live on as long as telefragged will let it. If anyone fears that it'll disappear, feel free to mirror it as closely as possible, as long as it doesn't mean I'll get any work to do (and as long as you don't claim it's your own ;). I must say that I was surprised how many people actually found this project useful. Thanks to everyone.

And all in all... Take care, all of you.

February 16, 2000:
While the experience of seeing that people think the stuff I write isn't my intellectual property certainly doesn't make me more likely to spend my time on writing new articles, I've added some info on the 'j' (jump) command of Grim Fandango developer mode to the Inside the Engine article.

February 10, 2000:
As mentioned on the forum, I have developed some debugging patches and .dlls for Grim Fandango and CMI. These are mainly intended for the technically inclined, and certainly not for beginners into LEC hacking or computers in general. They can be found at the bottom of the download page. Have fun! :)

February 5, 2000:
I'm happy to see that the new board has been so well received. Thanks! Anyway, added a tiny bit of info to the Inside the Engine! article, and added some new secrets to the Fate of Atlantis page.

February 4, 2000:
Sorry about the not-so-accessible forum yesterday. At the 11th hour I decided to scrap the board I'd chosen in order to use another one - mainly because there was no way to see if you had already read a message. So, the new board is now up here. Enjoy! :)

February 3, 2000:
Just added a nice "little" forum to the page. "Why?", I hear you ask. Well, as the LucasHacks board seems to go pretty unnoticed by the general SCUMM Revisited crowd, and as Tomas seems rather busy lately, I figured it was time to add a forum to this page and see if it'll get us more feedback :). I say "us", as yet another project I'm working on along with a net friend also has a forum at... the forum. More on that at... the forum.

February 1, 2000:
Hello again. First of all, I'm sorry about the delay of SCUMM Revisited 3. Right now, I can't really say when it will be out, but it won't be in February, that's for sure :) I'm currently quite stuck up with real life and another program (which may be of interest to you): the SCUMM IDE (Integrated Development Environment), which creates new bundles to be run using the CMI engine - new games, cutscene players, you name it. Right now, it's in early alpha state - we've managed to create a "game" which just displays the text "Hello World!" on the screen and then exits CMI :) Well, on to the news on this page.

You may have noticed I've added a button called "Vote" at the left. All it does is vote for this page at the LucasArts Top 25. Hope it doesn't annoy you too much, and if you have the time, try clicking it ;). More importantly, I've added a new article to the articles section, which deals with some unknown stuff about the CMI and Grim engines - developer mode, running in a window, etc. Check it out! :)

Oh, and be sure to check the new page for Weevil's Annotation Assistant!

December 17, 1999:
Yep, yet another redesign, a bit more extensive this time. "Why?" I hear you ask. Simply because I never was satisfied with the "new" one. I can assure you I'm satisfied with this one. Hope you like it too ;). In addition to the immediately obvious stuff, I've fixed some HTML standard problems to make it all more accessible (including different <TITLE>'s for each page).

Also added a new section: "Articles", which for now only holds one article: A complete description of how to decompress SCUMM images for all VGA games. In addition, I've permanently removed the SCUMM Format encyclopedia from the online help file, and moved it to a "Specs" section. In future help files, it will be removed too, simply because it allows faster addition of new specs. I've added a few new block specifications to the specs, by the way. All that, and I've made an animated GIF button for you people to use when linking, if you want. And made the download more accessible by adding links to mirrors (although some of them still don't have the file...) and adding ftp access.

Oh yes, and SCUMM Revisited 3 is doing fine - a bit less progress these christmas days - but it's doing fine nonetheless. I can still not tell anything specific about a release date. There's still a lot to get done. The "early next year" bit may have changed a tiny bit, it may be a few months into the new year. But it will see the light of day, someday. And now, a merry christmas to you all, and a happy new year!

December 7, 1999:
Just added a few more links and a new page: "Thanks", which includes acknowledgement for all the work people have done to help the release of SCUMM Revisited. This was always available in the help file, and will be available on the about box of SCUMMRev3, but these people need more credit! :)

December 3, 1999:
The page has entered a minor redesign along with the move to scummrev.mixnmojo.com, and many of the pages have been updated, including (but not limited to) the SCUMM Revisited 3 info, the FAQ etc. A links page has been added, holding links to more LucasHacking stuff (the tiny bit "more" there is...), to some of the best Lucas-related sites, to some other pages of mine, as well as pages with useful info for other SCUMM hackers - and a few pages, totally unrelated, that interest me currently. Hope some of it will be of use to you! If you know of pages that could be of interest to SCUMM hackers and which aren't listed, be sure to mail me! Also, if any of you great people outthere who have linked to me would change the link to the new subdomain, I'd be so freaking happy. Due to the usual telefragged screwup, I don't have access to the old page, and thus can't do a redirect just yet...

October 25, 1999:
After a another long wait, I hereby give you a huge treatise on the reason for this long wait, and why it will take even longer. Read the spanking new SCUMM Revisited 3 info.

September 5, 1999:
After a long wait due to a great Summer and lots of real life stuff to do, SCUMM Revisited v2.0.12 is out! This version adds some bug fixes (see the history) and the ability to rip music from the CMI cutscenes! Finally the CMI theme is ours! :) Read the CMI part of the Howto on music if you're confused about how to get to the cutscene music.

June 12, 1999:
Forgot to mention yesterday that we finally found Glottis' Dog House! Check out the Secrets area.

June 11, 1999:
Sorry for the lack of updates lately. Summertime is busy time, and not much has happend since May. Nevertheless, here is version 2.0.11, which adds support for the Sam & Max BOMP images (which are mainly road graphics for the Highway Surfing, and a few other things - nothing really exciting :), more support for the Phantom Menace game, and the very first hint of support for the Grim Fandango background images - only two so far, though: The opening splash screen of the bone wagon, and the time glass used during scene loading etc., some bugfixes and a few new features to do with palette viewing - check the history.

Other than that, I've been working a bit on decompilation of the GrimE scripts. This is far from done, though, and thus has been disabled in this version of the program.

On this site, I've added a small FAQ item on how to find the voice samples you're looking for. This should be quite useful for those of you who are in constant search for those funny lines :). On the secrets issue... Rikard Peterson wrote me about some samples in Full Throttle. Some of them, I have heard in the game, but one eludes me... Does Ben ever say that his name is Ruben, and that he was named after a sandwich? :) It's to be found around offset 0x0040B744. Anyone heard this in the game?

May 13, 1999:
Version 2.0.10 is out. This release adds support for CMI BOMP images, which are mostly used for inventory graphics. Also, some bugs have been fixed. Minor update :) - check the history. Also, updated the secrets with some new (and some old) stuff from CMI. Oh, and I guess now is the time to reveal to those of you who haven't found out yourselves (and haven't been told by "leaks") that, yes, there is an easter egg in SCUMM Revisited and there has been ever since v2.0.0. Let the hunt begin! :)

April 19, 1999:
Version 2.0.9 is out. This release adds support for playing and extracting Dig voices (not music yet), adds a few user interface changes - including the removal of the Save Image button (the menu item when viewing the image is obviously still there) as noone really complained about my proposal to remove it due to its inflexibility. A few bug fixes too - check the history.

March 24, 1999:
Lots and lots of page updates after I finally got actual ftp access to this site: I've added online help as well as a zipped version of the help to allow people without HTMLHelp to access the documentation. Also added a script to make my handling of annotations easier, which means that I finally added the newest annotations. And version 2.0.8 is out! Mainly a feature/bug update, rather than adding new stuff to decode. Check the history.

March 19, 1999:
Version 2.0.7 is out - lots of news, including viewing of GF materials (for those of you who can read the help file, BE SURE to read the new "How To..." item on viewing images, or I'll have tons of mails regarding "wrong colors" on the materials). Read the history for more info on what's new - GF materials is not the only important addition ;). I'm still working on a better way to manage annotations on this page, sorry. Can't do anything about it until telefragged gives me real ftp access to the site.