Johnny Castaway!!

[greg,taylor]

I don’t know who owns Johnny Castaway… but they need to convert it (and some of the other games) to the iphone!!   lol   I think it would be brilliant!  

Greg
(former Sierra Employee)

[Unknown,Unknown]

I’ve thought fifty times about doing Johnny Castaway for iphone, but have no idea who has the rights — and, odds are no one at Sierra, if there is a Sierra, has any idea either.

It was a very cool ‘game’ and it’s a shame to see it forgotten.

Ken
(former Sierra Employee)

[Tawmis,]

I would also like to see this, if it ever happened.

[Jaap,van_Wingerden]

Yeah, that’d be great. I’ve been working on reverse engineering the original jc, but didn’t get much further than extracting the individual resource files. Haven’t decyphered them yet. Left a bit of code here: http://code.google.com/p/johnny-castaway/

[Collector,]

The screensaver has already been redone for modern Windows, but only 32-bit.

http://members.tele2.nl/jaapjp/

[Jaap,van_Wingerden]

I know about that version, i made it. It’s essentially nothing more than an installer, a configuration tool, and a screen-resolution switch in order to make it full-screen. Plus some tricks to make windows XP and up recognize it. Not the slightest bit of chance it will port to any other platform like that.

[Collector,]

There was mention of Vista on that page. Nonetheless, It would be nice to get it working on Win7 x64.

[Jaap,van_Wingerden]

As vista 64-bit and win7 (32 and 64 bit) don’t have support for 16-bit windows executables anymore, even that would be difficult One possibility would be to layer it on top of a program like dosbox or some other kind of VM, but that would be more of a quick hack than an elegant solution. Better would be to figure out the used file-formats, and rewrite the engine. But reverse-engineering isnt an easy thing to do. Any help appreciated of course!

[Collector,]

I doubt that it has much in common with SCI, if any, but Sierra did share some code with Dynamix. I’m not sure if the ScummVM crew might be able to give you some ideas about it.

[Jaap,van_Wingerden]

Johnny Castaway was made using the Dynamix Game Development System (DGDS), which was also used to create Heart of China and some Willy Beamish games. It’t be really great if that system would ‘leak’ somehow. Somebody’s gotta have it archived. Though no-one I co tacted so far seems to be that person.

About the rights: I guess you shouldn’t worry too much about them, since sierra clearly distantiated itself from JC, according to the accompanying readme file.

[Collector,]

It might be possible to contact Jeff Tunnel. He does have a Facebook page on which he occasionally posts.

http://www.facebook.com/jefftunnell

If he doesn’t, he may know someone who does. There has been mention of supporting the Dynamix adventures in ScummVM, but I don’t think that anyone has picked it up. Still, it may be worth mentioning it there if any RE work on Johnny could be applied to the Dynamix adventures. If you could generate any interest in some of the devs there, who knows?

[Michael,Collard]

I read somewhere Screensavers.com bought the rights. 

That’s a place to start.

I contacted them to see if I could port it to Android, but haven’t heard back.

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