Our CD-i member Shikotei has more awesome news to share: His PC conversion of The Apprentice has completed and he just released the first version! Now we can all play the original The Apprentice rebuilt for PC. We have followed him a long way over the years. Shikotei:"CD-i may not have the best reputation according to 'the internet', but that doesn't mean there aren't any good games. The Apprentice is one such unmentioned gem. Personally it's my favorite game along with Dimo's Quest! Throughout the years I've had a pet project going on a slow pace. Sometime during 2010-2011 I started working on it."
Hobby Project
Shikotei continues: "As with most hobby projects, they either take a long time to get anywhere, or simply never see completion. After having started almost 9 years ago in Excel, porting this to PHP, porting that once again to Director in Lingo, and finally porting everything to Unity in C# this game has come a long way! A more detailed recap can be found here.
The Apprentice remade for PC is the project of just me whose idea of a challenge is programming everything from scratch. No black boxes, no bug-free engines, no such thing of any kind. Stupid? Perhaps.. but it got me knowledge beyond what I thought I needed to make a game! Knowledge that should enable me to make another one if I ever finish this one. "
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Copyright issue
"My version of The Apprentice requires an ISO of the original CD-i disc to run. It is needed because all the sprites, backgrounds, music, sound effects, and level layouts are stored there. None of them are aboard the game itself because that would be a copyright infringement. It is my way of trying to protect myself against those who hold the rights to the Apprentice. Every asset I extract from the IMG file is kept in memory and so nothing is actually stored on the hard drive."
More about the copyright issue you can read here.
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Shikotei : "They made me reconsider launching the game as-is (separate extractor and game).
I've deemed the extractor too dangerous to release as a separate executable and have looked for ways to integrate the thing completely into the game. Unfortunately Director doesn't support this kind of thing (which is the whole reason I had to make a separate program!) so that ruled out a release any time soon on the platform I've made the game so far with.
The past months I've spent finding a way to protect the extractor from abuse and concluded that a different develop environment was the best solution. Once I decided that I looked into development tools that could do what I wanted to do. My first alternative was Unity. For those unfamiliar with this: a lot of indie developers have used this program to make games for PC and consoles.
After a bunch of tests and proof-of-concept projects, I translated my Lingo code of The Apprentice to C#. This took me roughly two months.
Once this was done I added the extractor (already written in C#) and the integration process was completed." In short:
[Thanks, Shikotei]
The Apprentice remade for PC is the project of just me whose idea of a challenge is programming everything from scratch. No black boxes, no bug-free engines, no such thing of any kind. Stupid? Perhaps.. but it got me knowledge beyond what I thought I needed to make a game! Knowledge that should enable me to make another one if I ever finish this one. "
Copyright issue
"My version of The Apprentice requires an ISO of the original CD-i disc to run. It is needed because all the sprites, backgrounds, music, sound effects, and level layouts are stored there. None of them are aboard the game itself because that would be a copyright infringement. It is my way of trying to protect myself against those who hold the rights to the Apprentice. Every asset I extract from the IMG file is kept in memory and so nothing is actually stored on the hard drive."
More about the copyright issue you can read here.
Shikotei : "They made me reconsider launching the game as-is (separate extractor and game).
I've deemed the extractor too dangerous to release as a separate executable and have looked for ways to integrate the thing completely into the game. Unfortunately Director doesn't support this kind of thing (which is the whole reason I had to make a separate program!) so that ruled out a release any time soon on the platform I've made the game so far with.
The past months I've spent finding a way to protect the extractor from abuse and concluded that a different develop environment was the best solution. Once I decided that I looked into development tools that could do what I wanted to do. My first alternative was Unity. For those unfamiliar with this: a lot of indie developers have used this program to make games for PC and consoles.
After a bunch of tests and proof-of-concept projects, I translated my Lingo code of The Apprentice to C#. This took me roughly two months.
Once this was done I added the extractor (already written in C#) and the integration process was completed." In short:
I could release this version of The Apprentice!
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More tests were conducted: I put the game on a USB stick and asked friends if I could borrow their PC to see if the game would run. Of the ten systems I tried only one gave trouble. Though I ruled out the CPU (Intel and AMD), graphics card, RAM, operating system, and number of monitors as the cause of the issue. So yes, chances are it won't run on a system, but I am confident there won't be trouble for most of the people out there.
There is one last thing I would like to say: Please enjoy, and report any bugs you find on my new website! You can find a link to download the game here.
More tests were conducted: I put the game on a USB stick and asked friends if I could borrow their PC to see if the game would run. Of the ten systems I tried only one gave trouble. Though I ruled out the CPU (Intel and AMD), graphics card, RAM, operating system, and number of monitors as the cause of the issue. So yes, chances are it won't run on a system, but I am confident there won't be trouble for most of the people out there.
There is one last thing I would like to say: Please enjoy, and report any bugs you find on my new website! You can find a link to download the game here.
Installation
To get the game running you'll need the game files from this site and an IMG/ISO file of the CD-i disc of The Apprentice. ISObuster, CloneCD, and similar software should be able to create one of these. When you've done that, check if the size of the file is around 656.913.600 bytes.
This file then needs to be renamed to "The_Apprentice.img" and placed in the same folder as the game. At the end of this step you should have something similar to the screenshot below:
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Now just run "The Apprentice.exe" and you're all set to go!
Controls
To get the game running you'll need the game files from this site and an IMG/ISO file of the CD-i disc of The Apprentice. ISObuster, CloneCD, and similar software should be able to create one of these. When you've done that, check if the size of the file is around 656.913.600 bytes.
This file then needs to be renamed to "The_Apprentice.img" and placed in the same folder as the game. At the end of this step you should have something similar to the screenshot below:
Controls
The controls are fairly simple; the CD-i controllers had two or three buttons and a D-pad or thumb stick. And I'm keeping to that scheme, just translated to a keyboard. For now it's not possible to re-assign these yourself, though it is planned for a future release.
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For full-screen use Alt-Enter as highlighted in red. Thank you Shikotei for this great milestone!
Tips
Two tips that we learnt along the way:
For full-screen use Alt-Enter as highlighted in red. Thank you Shikotei for this great milestone!
Tips
Two tips that we learnt along the way:
- As you've read in the article you will still need the ISO of the game due to copyright issues. And at this time of writing, you can still download the ISO of The Apprentice from Gametronik, easy and free: http://www.gametronik.com/.../The%2520Apprentice%2520.../
- If you download the iso file from the internet, be sure just to rename it theapprentice.img (so with an img extension) otherwise the executable doesn't recognize it. But this went for me without problems (file structure is the same)
More tips will be added later :)
[Thanks, Shikotei]