I’m now hosting some patches that allow Sam and Max Season 2 to run under Windows 2000.
Just to make it clear – I didnt make these patches, Maks Verver did. I am just hosting them on his behalf.
Also note that these are unofficial patches that are not authorized or supported by Telltale Games. If you encounter problems running one of the games on Windows 2000, you should reinstall the game on a supported operating system before contacting Telltale Games for technical support.
Day 3 sees the release of a new tool – Telltale Speech Extractor.
It enables you to rip the voices and sfx from all games released by Telltale Games (yes that means Sam and Max).
The tool plays the sounds, lets you save them as wav or mp3, can filter them by character and lets you search for specific dialogue. In short, it makes it really easy to browse and search the sounds, especially if you know what you’re looking for.
What makes this tool extra-special though, is its annotation support. See the screenshot below? See how for each sound it lists who said it and whats said? Those are annotations. To quote the readme: “Annotations are descriptive names given to sounds. They list what is said and what character says it. This allows the sounds to be easily browsed, filtered and searched“. The sounds don’t contain any textual information besides the filename, so all of that extra information has been added to the annotations, for every single game.
Unfortunately, despite my best efforts, the annotations aren’t complete. In most games there are still around 50 sounds that don’t have annotations. Who’s going to fix this? Well hopefully you are. Annotation editing is built into the tool and its very easy to use. I just need people to finish the annotations for a game and then send me their annotation file. This is all explained in the readme, so if you’re interested in helping out, just have a look at that.
Day 2 brings an update to the Telltale Music Extractor.
Vista compatibility has been added, and it now supports all currently available Telltale games.
It does exactly what it says on the tin. Download it here.
Check back tomorrow for a much bigger update with a completely new tool.
Heads up tinkerers, hackers and the 3 regular visitors to this site; I’ve just found out how to bring up the debug menu in recent Telltale games and now I’m going to show you how to do it too.
The debug menu lets you skip to any section of a game, complete with the appropriate inventory items. It’s therefore useful if you’ve lost your saved game or want to replay a specific section to see what you’ve missed. By ‘recent games’ I mean Bone 1+2 and all episodes of Sam and Max Season One. You’ll need to have bought and registered the games as the debug menu only works on registered versions. Activating the menu is a simple process.
In the Sam and Max games:
In the Bone games:
I found out how to activate the menu a long time ago; that is to say I worked out what had to be done to activate it, but I didn’t know the required key combination. Earlier today I was playing through the final episode of Sam and Max when I remembered the debug menu. In the past I’d tried a number of different key combinations..surely I’d tried the most obvious one? Without any expectations I pressed shift and D, double clicked and…nothing. I tried it with control and…aha. There’s no substitute for a lucky guess.
As you may know by now, Telltale have updated their older games. Out from Boneville and The Great Cow Race have been updated to the newest version of the Telltale engine. It looks like Texas Holdem will soon be updated too.
Unfortunately, they’ve also updated the resource files used by the games – these are all now encrypted. The end result of this is that Telltale Explorer cant handle the new resource files. CSI will still work, as will the old versions of the games, but the new updated ones wont. I’m trying to fix this, but its very difficult, since the new resource files are heavily obscured and encrypted. In the meantime, people can keep an eye on the SCUMM hacking forums to see what progress is being made.
Happily, there’s also good news. Music can still be extracted using the Telltale Music Extractor, and the tool also works with the new Telltale game – Sam and Max: Culture Shock (which you should all be buying).
