[Scummvm-tracker] [ScummVM :: Bugs] #15502: SCUMM: INDY3 Pink pixels at Irene's typewriter

[ScummVM :: Bugs]

#15502: SCUMM: INDY3 Pink pixels at Irene's typewriter
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Reporter:  GermanTribun     |       Owner:  dwatteau
    Type:  feature request  |      Status:  pending
Priority:  low              |   Component:  Engine: SCUMM
 Version:                   |  Resolution:  assigned
Keywords:                   |        Game:  Indiana Jones 3
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Comment (by dwatteau):

 Kind of.

 The weird pink/cyan lines in Berlin and Castle Brunwald have an
 enhancement to remove them because they were 1) very obvious on the screen
 2) clearly unintended (no reason for them to be displayed in the game) 3)
 the original art could easily be restored without including any
 copyrighted resource in our source code and 4) these weird lines confused
 some players.

 Actually, I took the motivation to work on these fixes because I saw
 several Twitch players wondering quite a lot about them, during gameplay
 (thinking there was an "emulator (sic) bug", or some puzzle to solve).

 Another example of what we did was to fix the color of the Nazis' uniforms
 in Castle Brunwald in the FM-TOWNS release
 (https://github.com/scummvm/scummvm/pull/3930). It was done because we
 knew it was an unintended continuity error (their color is correct in the
 other rooms of the Castle, the fix is already present in the official DOS
 VGA release, and an analysis of the script showed how the error originally
 appeared: it was using a palette override, which was necessary in the EGA
 release, but had no reason to exist in the VGA release -- as was publicly
 documented by ATMachine many years ago).

 The EGA art that wasn't converted for the VGA release is probably another
 matter. It causes no functional problem or confusion, it's just a lost
 opportunity that happened back then. But how do we know what the VGA
 artists would have done, which colors they would have chosen? Also, how do
 we fix original art, without taking any copyright risk? (apart from some
 very trivial fix, such as changing only a few pixels, exchanging a color
 for another one, and so on, of course).

 Another thing to take into consideration is that, in their current
 implementation, the enhancements "pollute" the SCUMM engine code a bit
 (that's why we label them ''workarounds'' in the source code). So, if we
 need to add a dozen of inline "patches" in the engine code to fix all the
 various EGA resources in the VGA release, it's going to get rather large.

 So yeah, it's about trying to draw the line somewhere... I agree that the
 official VGA releases of Indy3 all look rushed in some way, and that it
 would be so nice to fix all their original "mistakes". But I'm not sure
 ScummVM's goal is to fix each and every one of them, especially when you
 take into consideration the copyright/implementation limits we currently
 have.

 Maybe another solution for some fixes that some players want would be to
 add support for fan-made .IPS files or something like that (but then, that
 code would need to be written, and I'm not sure we want to deal with
 this)…

 …or maybe Indy3 deserves a community-made "Ultimate Edition", as was done
 for Monkey1/Monkey2 (which was very well done, both in terms of care,
 contents and technical implementation). I know there were some people
 interested in producing a fan-made patch like that. But look at how long
 is the list of changes in the readme.txt file of the Ultimate Talkie
 Edition. It's amazing, it's impressive work, it's a joy to be able to play
 that release. But I'm not sure it would have been wise to implement of all
 its fixes/improvements in our SCUMM engine code.

 We're open to suggestions about small fixes, including visual ones. But
 each "WORKAROUND" in our code has a cost, and I'm not sure a 2-pixel color
 issue is worth it. It's like fixing original typos in the subtitles; we
 currently do fix some of them (see
 <https://github.com/scummvm/scummvm/blob/branch-2-9/engines/scumm/script_v5.cpp#L3367-L3516>),
 but we're not going to fix any "it's/its" mistake in the original games.
-- 
Ticket URL: <https://bugs.scummvm.org/ticket/15502#comment:5>
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