Quick And Easy Software

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 - 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.

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.

After being plagued by comment spam the site’s news system has been changed from Cutenews to Wordpress. This wont affect the site much, old url’s are automatically redirected, the only thing that people need to change is the url of the RSS feed.

Alongside this, the site’s design has been changed to give it a cleaner, more modern appearance. There shouldn’t be any problems with the new site, but if you notice anything please let me know.

Announcing a new program: ScummVM ToolBox.

The program expands upon a feature of the now defunct ScummVM Q+E - it provides a friendly, quick and easy frontend to the ScummVM command line tools. For those that dont know, these tools let you compress the audio and video files in many games, extract the datafiles from certain games and decompile scripts from SCUMM games, the Legend of Kyrandia and Broken Sword 2.

These extra tools dont have a gui and previously required much typing at the command prompt if you wanted to tweak the settings. Now though, you can just use the ScummVM ToolBox. It uses a simple wizard-style interface modelled on that used by Nero Express, downloads all the extra files needed, cleans up any temp files and replaces command line switches with a friendly interface. All you need to do is download the program and run it.

In truth this program isnt completely new, I released it on the ScummVM forums a few months ago. I havent really had the time or motivation to make any further changes so I’m releasing it as it is. There are some missing features, these are listed in the readme, if you would like to see these added you can always contact me and ask.

Firstly a big thank-you to everyone who’s donated through Paypal. I really appreciate your support. Quick and Easy Software is now more than 4 years old and from a test project I made to teach myself programming, its grown into the juggernaut* that you see today.

I’m continuing to work on existing and new programs; recently I’ve been able to deceipher a bit more of the Psychonauts PS2 resource file and have now located the speech and music files. In the past some people have expressed interest in translating some of my programs into other languages. If anyone’s still interested in this then let me know. Obviously you will need to be reasonably fluent in both English and your other language, but its not like the programs contain a great deal of text. I myself cant translate my programs, as they arent made up of French road directions or German numbers.

* I considered using the word behemoth instead, but that was a lie too far.

Its always the way, you fix one thing and something else breaks. An odd bug appeared in the last release of the Grim Fandango Launcher - the debug keys window had no scrollbar, so most of the keys weren’t visible. Thanks to Mark Aplin for letting me know about this.

Download the fixed version here.

While replaying Grim Fandango recently, the ever-vigilant Huz spotted a bug with my Grim Fandango Launcher. The launcher checks if the Grim patch has been installed - if not it will download and install it for you. However the launcher also lets you play the game entirely from the hard drive - by copying files from the cd’s. Still with me? The problem was this - if you patched the game and then later told the launcher to copy the game datafiles to hard drive, one file (Grim.tab) would be overwritten by an older version from the cd.

Anyway, it’s fixed now and you can download Grim Fandango Launcher 1.3 here.

While I was looking into this I was reminded of yet another unreleased program of mine. I loaded it up, tidied and tweaked it and the Grim Fandango Dialog Editor is now publicly available. It does what it says on the tin, and allows you to edit the subtitle text in Grim Fandango. This may be useful for those wanting to translate the text into another language.

Download it here.

Announcing a new program: the Psychonauts Saved Game Editor.

A great many settings are stored within Psychonauts’ saved games and using this tool you can edit them all. Variables such as the number of lives, rank etc. can be changed and you can even alter more exotic settings such as the model used for inventory items. I myself havent looked into what a lot of the settings do so there’s bound to be more things to discover.

A common tasks menu keeps things simple and allows you to quickly change popular settings such as the number of lives. You can also switch the current level and jump to any level on the game. This tool is probably the closest we’ll come to a Psychonauts debug mode (until someone figures out how to unlock it).

I originally made this tool for my own use, recently though I decided to clean it up, make it a bit more user-friendly and release it. I hope you find it useful.

Download it here.

I forgot that I hadnt uploaded the latest source code for Psychonauts Explorer. You can now download the source for 1.2 here.

In other news, I’ve decided to stop development on ScummVM Quick And Easy. Improvements to ScummVM have meant that its far easier to use than its command line driven ancestors, and planned future features such as game autodetection and a new prettier gui call into question the need for a frontend like Q+E. I cant really call a frontend ‘quick and easy’ when it requires you to choose the location of your game and an appropriate target while ScummVM can auto-detect the game itself. Additionally, changes such as the merging of multiple game targets into 1 make it much harder for ScummVM Q+E to co-exist in a clean way with ScummVM.

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As promised I’ve released a new version of Psychonauts Explorer.

New in version 1.2:

Added:
• File search tool.
• Partial (and experimental) support for the PS2 version.

Fixes:

• File dumping has been completely overhauled - now files never get overwritten.
• Better handling of duplicate files within archives.
• Xbox version - a few image files were listed as tga so couldnt be viewed.
• PC Demo Version - In the .pkg file some file types were incorrectly recognised.
• Image previews are now larger and proportional to the window size.
• Renamed the level models and added the correct file extension.

Cosmetic changes:

• New program icon.
• Added icons for all filetypes.
• Filetype icons now shown in the view menu.
• Some other minor cosmetic changes.

PS2 support is only partial, around half the files are displayed and it may not work with some versions of the game. If you want full PS2 support see this post.

Download the new version here.

A new version of Psychonauts Explorer will be out within the next week or so and will feature limited support for the PS2 version along with the usual array of bugfixes and changes.I’ve been having real trouble deciphering the file format for Psychonauts PS2. Part of the problem is the sheer size of the file - its 3gb. I hear on the grapevine though, that a demo of the PS2 version exists. It would really help if I could get hold of the demo files, if anyone out there has the demo please let me know.

Also, if anyone knows about image formats and techniques, particulary those used on the PS2, take a look at this thread and see if you can help.

Yes, its another one.

Bone Ttarch Creator - a program that enables you to create .ttarch files so that you can edit the game content.

I’ve updated the software page with two new tools for the Telltale game Bone: Out From Boneville.

Firstly there’s the Bone Music Extractor, which rips some of the music and sounds from the game. And secondly there’s the Bone Ttarch Dumper - a dumper for the .ttarch archive used by the game.

Announcing version 1.1 of Psychonauts Explorer. A lot of development time has gone into this release, the most important changes are:

• Now uses a new audio decoder created by John Doe. As a result:
• The xbox audio codec is no longer needed. Audio files are now dumped to normal wav files.
• Every audio file in the pc version now plays correctly as do 99% of those in the xbox version.
• You can now view/save the artwork and textures from each level. (Look inside the .ppf level files).
• Fixed problems with the Xbox version - the previous release didnt work correctly with the .ppf and .pkg files. This was due to a silly mistake on my part.
• Added ‘raw dumping’ for xbox audio files - it was accidentally left out of the last release.

Get it here.