Admittedly things have been very slow musically, lately, and in order to try to keep this blog alive, one reason for that, other than my dayjob of just over two years being a priority, is that I've spent some time experimenting with the modding of older games. This post will be covering the modding of one game in particular, one that I fully admit is a very unusual choice for a mod: Myst.
No, I'm not talking the various remasters and remakes: even the ScummVM recreation is pretty lacking due in part to it only supporting the Windows versions. I'm talking about the very original Mac version of the game, possibly one of the most complex successful HyperCard stacks ever made.
No, I'm not talking the various remasters and remakes: even the ScummVM recreation is pretty lacking due in part to it only supporting the Windows versions. I'm talking about the very original Mac version of the game, possibly one of the most complex successful HyperCard stacks ever made.
The idea for my mod was fairly simple: improve the sound quality by making everything 16-bit (the original game was 8-bit), roughly doubling the typical samplerate (an unusual 11127 Hz to 22050), and stereo when possible over mono.
Compiling all of the higher quality sounds from a sound library that it turns out made most of the sound effects (The Works, currently distributed by Sound Ideas), and the iPhone port of the game for most of the rest, was the relatively easy part. The trickier part was reimporting them via ResEdit on the Mac OS 9 emulation side, and the open-source ResForge project on my host Mac's side.
Compiling all of the higher quality sounds from a sound library that it turns out made most of the sound effects (The Works, currently distributed by Sound Ideas), and the iPhone port of the game for most of the rest, was the relatively easy part. The trickier part was reimporting them via ResEdit on the Mac OS 9 emulation side, and the open-source ResForge project on my host Mac's side.
This process resulted in three obstacles:
1. Some sounds occassionally failed to play. After some diagnosing, I discovered the problem was that the sounds of concern were too large for the current memory settings to handle, but fortunately, doubling the memory requirements for the game by editing the SIZE resource via ResEdit seems to have all but fixed that.
2. The game originally stored most of the non-looping sounds in a single resource file, which turned out to be a problem because said resource files seemingly cannot exceed a filesize of 16 MB. Therefore, the only solution for this was to split it up into multiple files.
3. The movie files that made use of sound changed their timestamps after reimporting the sound, and consequently, scripts that made use of video timestamps had shorter durations, roughly 3/5 to be exact.
Obstacles 2 and 3 could only be fully overcome by loading up HyperCard (2.4, in my case) and changing the scripting marginally, which, in retrospect, is risky territory, hence, why I hesitate to share the edited stack files in particular.
Still, I am satisfied with the results, and if there is enough interest, I am willing to share videos of what I've done, at the very least.
For anyone else with an interest in modding other old Mac games, ResForge is definitely a great way to ease into it!
1. Some sounds occassionally failed to play. After some diagnosing, I discovered the problem was that the sounds of concern were too large for the current memory settings to handle, but fortunately, doubling the memory requirements for the game by editing the SIZE resource via ResEdit seems to have all but fixed that.
2. The game originally stored most of the non-looping sounds in a single resource file, which turned out to be a problem because said resource files seemingly cannot exceed a filesize of 16 MB. Therefore, the only solution for this was to split it up into multiple files.
3. The movie files that made use of sound changed their timestamps after reimporting the sound, and consequently, scripts that made use of video timestamps had shorter durations, roughly 3/5 to be exact.
Obstacles 2 and 3 could only be fully overcome by loading up HyperCard (2.4, in my case) and changing the scripting marginally, which, in retrospect, is risky territory, hence, why I hesitate to share the edited stack files in particular.
Still, I am satisfied with the results, and if there is enough interest, I am willing to share videos of what I've done, at the very least.
For anyone else with an interest in modding other old Mac games, ResForge is definitely a great way to ease into it!
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