Sam and Max Windows 2000 Patches

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.

Get them here.

Quick And Easy Week – Day 3: Telltale Speech Extractor

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).

Download it here.

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.

Telltale Speech Extractor

Sam and Max and Bone Debug Menus

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:

  • Hold Control, Shift and D on the keyboard and double click on the arrow button (the button that opens the menu).

In the Bone games:

  • Bring up the menu screen (by pressing escape) hold Control, Shift and D on the keyboard and click on the ‘quit’ option.

Cow Race Debug MenuOut From Boneville Debug MenuReality 2.0 Debug Menu

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.

Telltale Tools – An Update

This is a quick post to clarify things regarding Telltale Explorer and my other Telltale-related tools. A few people have asked me when new versions of my programs will be released, supporting Sam and Max and the new directors cut versions of the Bone games.

The short answer is probably never, or at least not for the foreseeable future. Here’s why: All the newer Telltale games have encrypted datafiles, both the main .ttarch archive and the files within it are encrypted. The older Telltale games used this encryption only on lua scripts and images – which is why images in Out From Boneville appeared corrupted.

Recently John_Doe managed to figure out this encryption. This was a pretty amazing feat; the encryption was very complicated, especially in the newer games. Thanks to John_Doe I was able to update Telltale Explorer to add support for all Telltale Games and to fix many existing problems such as the image corruption in Out From Boneville.

However Telltale have requested that I don’t release the new version. This is a perfectly legitimate request, they were very nice about it and I will respect their wishes. Having a program floating around that decrypts all Telltale datafiles could cause them problems and I have no wish to encumber Telltale. The point I want to stress here is that Telltale didn’t do a Lucasarts on me. I wasn’t put under any pressure and I wasn’t sent a cease and desist notice; they made a request and I was happy to agree to it.

To clarify then: its highly unlikely that Telltale Explorer, Telltale Ttarch Creator and Telltale LangDB Editor will be updated. I probably will update the Telltale Music Extractor though.

Telltale Updates Older Games

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).

Ttarch Creator Updated

I’ve updated the Ttarch Creator. It can now create .ttarch archives for Telltale Texas Hold’em, Bone: Out from Boneville and CSI – 3 Dimensions of Murder.

As a result, its name has changed from the Bone Ttarch Creator to the Telltale Ttarch Creator.

Get it here.

Telltale Explorer – Another New Tool

Telltale Explorer – a program to extract, view and convert resources from the 4 Telltale games that have been released so far. The tool will be instantly familiar to anyone that’s used Psychonauts Explorer, it uses the same interface and has similar features.

Some of the things that you can do with the latest version of Telltale Explorer:

  • Open and dump files from Telltale archives.
  • Display a preview of images, textures and fonts.
  • Save images/fonts as JPEG, BMP or PNG.
  • Extract and save music as ogg files.
  • Decode the dialog scripts for CSI and Texas Hold’em.
  • View the contents of many other Telltale files.

Get it here.

New Tool – Telltale Music Extractor

Some of you may remember the Bone Music Extractor tool. I’ve now replaced this with the Telltale Music Extractor.

It enables you to rip the music from all 4 Telltale Games (Telltale Texas Hold’em, Bone: Out From Boneville, CSI-3 Dimensions of Murder, Bone: The Great Cow Race).

Download it here.

Keep checking the site, I’ll be releasing another Telltale-related tool later in the week.