I’ve played Broken Sword, AstraWare’s latest hit, a lot last evening / night. The port is, as far as I can tell, excellent – it greatly utilizes the capabilities of VGA Pocket PC’s, unlike the, in this respect too (it also completely lacks voices), far inferior, 8-9 months ago released Palm OS version. If you have a VGA Pocket PC, make sure you give it a try.

I don’t elaborate much on the game itself because I agree with Eric Pankoke’s excellent review at PocketGamer. Please see his review and further comments. Here, I only add additional information / remarks.

I’ve played the game on several of my WM2003(SE) and WM5 Pocket PC’s (HTC Wizard, WM5-upgraded HP iPAQ hx4700; Dell Axim x51v with ROM version A12; HP iPAQ 2210; Pocket Loox 720) and encountered no compatibility or speed problems – not even on my “slow” HTC Wizard (imate K-Jam, T-Mobile MDA Vario, Qtek 9100, MDA Vario, XDA mini S, SPV M3000, VPA Compact II, Dopod 838). The only small bug (?) I had was that the “this item can be clicked/used” cogs sometimes (particularly after game loading and/or suspending and, then, resuming the Pocket PC while the game was active) disabled and only displayed around the main sprite. Then, a quick cycle of the enabling of these icons helped (by just clicking the “cog” icon in the lower left corner).



My (a veteran adventure player that have played through all the remarkable adventures on the C64, Amiga and PC in the late eighties and early nineties) only grief with the port is as follows:

1. the voice/music quality could be better. It sounds as if it were sampled at 8 kHz (or 11 kHz at max.) I’m just in the process of ordering the original version of Broken Sword here in Europe (fortunately, it seems it’s still being distributed by Sold Out Software but, unfortunately, Amazon.de doesn’t list it and I’d prefer not ordering from Amazon.com before of the distances, the time it gets here and extra fees involved) so that I can compare the Astraware port to that (and I can try "hacking" the original music/sound files - MUSIC*.BSP, SPEECH*.BSP in AstraWare's port - to see whether the "hacked" version, if it works at all, would result in a sound / voice quality increase). I’ll produce a hack tutorial (if it’s possible at all) if I manage to do it. (Note that the SCUMM cutscene add-on packs files available here are in MPEG-2 and, therefore, totally incompatible with the port. Also, they are cutscenes only and not speech/music files.) Astraware could also consider releasing add-on packs and/or downloadable speech/music packs for Pocket PC users that have sufficiently large free space on their storage cards to accommodate the larger speech/music packs.
2. as with many Sierra/Lucasarts-type adventures (as opposed to those of Legend Entertainment or Magnetic Scrolls, which don't actively display the main character), this title contains a lot of character animations. They are cool to stare at, but certainly waste a lot of time (for die-hard adventure fans that prefer playing over just enjoying well-drawn animations and/or parallax scroll during walking - it's pretty spectacular, but adventure fans are not really want waste time on them), and can’t be skipped, unlike with most desktop versions (where you can also set, in most cases, the animation speed. It's not possible with the Broken Sword port). It’s only individual sentences in conversations that can be skipped, nothing else, which means animations are really time-consuming. In this respect, non-animated, “traditional” text/ static picture-based (with point-and-click support) adventures fare better because they don’t force the player just to sit and wait until, for example, the character gets from position A to B or a lengthy animation (for example, trying to raise the manhole cover) is played. Astraware should consider adding a, say, configurable “Escape” button to greatly speed up gameplay by just letting the player skip these animations.

Otherwise, it’s by far the best adventure game on the Pocket PC right now. It certainly beats Fade, the, up to now, best “traditional” adventure, in almost every respect (except for the “how much time is wasted on not necessarily wanted character animations” stuff). Note that I prefer text-rich adventures (like Fade) to semi-FPS adventures like those of Tetraedge (Return to Mysterious Island, Egyptian Prophecy, Atlantis Redux) unlike many other Pocket PC players (yes, I’ve always preferred the textual adventures like those of Legend Entertainment); this is why I've always considered Fade the best Pocket PC adventure game. Now, its place is taken by Broken Sword. Particularly if you own a VGA Pocket PC, you will really want to check out this title.

Again, I’d like to point out (like in my first report on the final version) that, right now, you can purchase the game right from AstraWare for $19.99 only, as opposed to other sources.

If only Astraware added an “Escape” button or some similar functionality to speed up gameplay and there were a way to enhance the voice/music quality…

Practical tips

Note that the game stores its savegames, by default, in the main memory, in \My Documents\My Saved Games. While saved games don’t take up much disk space, you may still want to relocate them to a storage card to, for example, minimize writing operations on the main storage (to, say, avoid filesys.exe compactions on non-native WM5 Pocket PC’s – hear me, Dell Axim x50(v) or HP iPAQ hx users that upgraded to WM5?) To do this, just relocate the directory to a card and accordingly modify HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\ SOFTWARE\ Apps\ Astraware Broken Sword\ SaveDir in the Registry.

During the testing (which also included mass-deployment of the game on my (several) test Pocket PC’s – yes, I always test the Pocket PC titles I review on ALL my test Pocket PC’s and this includes mass-deployment), I’ve also noticed that, to avoid lengthy and space-consuming (re)installation procedures, you can directly keep/copy the main game files (under WM5, they’re in \Program Files\Astraware\Broken Sword 1\ on the storage card) in/to the same directory. Then, you only need to make sure you copy all the

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Apps\Astraware Broken Sword Cutscenes]
[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Apps\Astraware Broken Sword Speech]
[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Apps\Astraware Broken Sword Music]
[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Apps\Astraware Broken Sword Data]
[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Apps\Astraware Broken Sword]

registry keys (with a simple registry export/import) to the new device (by necessarily modifying – by a mass search / replace operation - the paths if the storage card is named differently in the other device) and also the save directory (if you don’t relocate it) at \My Documents\My Saved Games.

Microsoft MVP - Mobile Devices, 2006, 2007. See my PPC & SP blog HERE.

    

If I'm right, the voices and music were taken from the original PC game in 1996, which was designed to use the SB16/AWE 32... which may explain the 8Khz sound quality; although the SB16 SHOULD have been able to take advantage of 16KHz playback, from what I recall it wasn't the best at it and sound quality suffered.

Or else it was resampled and recompressed at a lower bitrate to save disk space. You'd have to ask Astraware.

 

Well, even the original Sound Blaster 2.01 (1991) was capable of 44.1 kHz playback. All of the later models were capable of the same.

The guys over at PocketGamer said the voices in the original game were of better quality; I'd certainly check this as soon as I manage to get it.

Microsoft MVP - Mobile Devices, 2006, 2007. See my PPC & SP blog HERE.

    

As I said, the second option was that they may have resampled - I can tell you that my AWE32 loved 44.1KHz playback, but I've heard some other cards were a little scratchy anyways. I know they weren't all that great at handling anything about 11-bit sound, at any rate... from what I recall of reviews of the SB16 Value, for example, they indicated sound quality took a nosedive after you passed that barrier.

Either way, it -was- a CD game, and even with MP3 you can only compress it so much. For a PocketPC game, this thing's impressive and probably the best translation of Broken Sword for a portable unit to date (the GBA one's much more pixelated, for example).

 

Yup, early SB's sometimes had problems with the digital channel(s), not to mention the digital noise marring FM synthesized sounds too. Back in late 1990, when I bought my first SB 1.5 (it costed me a real fortune!), all my Amiga owner friends laughed at the noisy FM synthezis and the really sub-par one-channel 8-bit digital outout of my card (which costed about half of an Amiga 500 back then...)

For example, when I coded my MOD player back in 1991 (in x86 assembly), I still preferred using a pair of 8-bit D/A's on the printer port because of the uch superior, stereo digital sound.

Yup, agree.

My point is: the PPC version of Broken Sword is by far the best (handheld) port so far. It's just incomparably better than the Palm OS and the GBA version. The GBA can't be better because of the hardware limitations (low-res screen); the Palm OS version could be much better because of the HiRes+ (480*320) resolution and the capable hardware (stereo 44 kHz digital channels). Graphics-wise (real 640*480 on PPC, not a pixelizated crap unlike on HiRes+ Palm devices) it really excels on the Pocket PC.

However, the sound of the PPC version could be even better with an add-on pack and/or midi-based (not digitized sound like now!) music. If the original version of the game had had 11+ kHz sound (this is what I don't know at all as I still don't have the original version), an additional, reconverted/resampled speech pack would be really nice, even if we had to sacrifice a lot of additional memory card space.

Music ditto. Now, the music is digitised, also at either 8 or 11 kHz, resulting in a comparatively-not-that-good-quality - not at all midi and/or wavetable-based, which, I think, the original surely (?) was.

Don't take me wrong: I love the game and I recommend it to everyone, particularly to VGA users and particularly now that it's (still) available at AstraWare for $20 only. It's by far the best PPC adventure game now and clearly beats everything else. As a computing & hardware & coder freak who knows what the Pocket PC hardware is capable of, however, I clearly know how the game could be made much better, voice and music quality-wise. An add-on quality (sampled at 22 / 44 kHz; the music preferably in stereo) speech/music pack would make the game the bets, music / voice-wise too.

Microsoft MVP - Mobile Devices, 2006, 2007. See my PPC & SP blog HERE.

    

Ah, the problem here is that neither one of us (at least no longer) has Circle of Blood to see what the original was sampled at, nor the PS1 (Shadow of the Templars) version to see how it was done. If the audio was done (voices that is) at that level, then there's little to be done - music at least can be rescored.

 

Yup, reconverting (and releasing it as a, say, freely downloadable add-on pack for people that want much more quality music and have the necessary storage space for it) at least the music would be great.

Microsoft MVP - Mobile Devices, 2006, 2007. See my PPC & SP blog HERE.

    

Hi folks,

I don't often post here, so for those who don't know me, my name is Kieren Smith, and I'm the Producer at Astraware, in charge of working with the developers to make sure games like Broken Sword come out looking, playing and sounding as fantastic as possible.

Since this was a particularly interesting discussion, I thought I'd drop by and reply to some of the questions which have come up!

I guess the big question is the voice quality - the sample rate used by the game for the voices is indeed 11KHz, which (after checking with the developers) was the same as that used by the original voice samples. Very early on in the project, I spent some time comparing the playback from the PC version, the ScummVM version on Pocket PC and the early alphas of our own Pocket PC version, the speech is important to the game and you don't want something critical to come out sounding like George has a mouthful of water. To be completely honest, I actually couldn't hear a noticeable difference between the ScummVM and our own version in terms of the speech quality - the limiting factor here was the quality of the sound output on the device itself, and even though I consider the quality on my Exec to be pretty awesome, I couldn't detect a difference myself. Trying headphones instead, all three came out pretty much the same again (PC speakers had seemed better, but I wonder if that's because the larger speakers meant they produced a better quality sound overall, in dependant of the source)

(as a side note, when looking at the ScummVM version, I'm pretty sure it was possible to re-encode the speech files from the CD at 44KHz, even though the original data isn't sampled at anywhere near that rate! :P)

It is possible that the strong compression of the speech produced some changes to the final sound quality which I couldn't detect, and if that's the case and people do feel it's serious, I'll certainly take a closer look at it to see if there's anything which can be done in a future version. Reducing the compression on the speech will have a noticeable impact on size (already the largest overall component of the game), and we wanted to try and get the final size of the game to under 128Mb (and I'm very happy that we succeeded!)

On the topic of the music quality, unfortunately the original recordings weren't available, so we used the best quality source we could!

Consider it on my "to consider" list for future updates I rather liked the in-game animations, and apart from wanting to be able to skip them when testing a section for the umpteenth time, I have to admit that I'm not sure the majority of users would want it. However, it's not a bad idea, and since you can skip cutscenes it might make sense to add a similar mechanism for in-game animations if it's possible to do so (cutscenes and animations are two very different types within the game engine, so it may not be as easy to jump ahead past an animation as it sounds!)

There's a lengthy background explanation to why we default to internal memory for storing savegame and other preference files, but I've come across this problem myself (interestingly though, the native WM5 devices don't seem to suffer from it). The tweak you suggested (changing the location "SaveDir" points to) does seem to help, and is something which can be generally applied to those of our games which behave like this. I've resisted posting the tip publicly because while many users of this forum are strongly technically minded, I am always worried about less experienced users causing damage to their registry through inexperience, so I would ask that anyone considering editing their registry should first be absolutely certain of what they are doing!

Warmest regards,
Kieren
Producer, Astraware
kieren@astraware.com

Thanks for the answer!

Microsoft MVP - Mobile Devices, 2006, 2007. See my PPC & SP blog HERE.

    

Sweet - now we know the answer, and the answer is 'yes, the voices were sampled at that level'. Good to know, and I can't say I'm complaining about the game at all myself - it's still probably my favorite Astraware game at the moment, and I've bought quite a few of them so far.

 

Well, now that I've thoroughly compared the original ScummVM voices (and music) to that of the WM version, I don't think they're similar in quality.

See http://www.aximsite.com/boards/emula...r-scummvm.html . In there, I've thoroughly compared the native WM version of Broken Sword to the emulated one and emphasized the differences and the advantages of each version.

Astraware REALLY should release an imporoved speech / music pack. Nowadays everyone has BIG storage cards.

Microsoft MVP - Mobile Devices, 2006, 2007. See my PPC & SP blog HERE.