Scholastic Book Club Catalogue: Tom Sawyer (1996)

[Quills]

I'm a Super Mario 64 ROM hacker and habitual modder and I went down a rather different rabbit hole than usual today.

I'm Australian, and I received Lego Island via the Scholastic Book Club Catalogue in the '90s. This catalogue also had the Magic School Bus games and other educational products on CD-ROM for Win9x.
One of these CD's that I had was Tom Sawyer (1996) in the Living Classics collection published by Europress.

It's mostly an abridged version of The Adventures of Tom Story novel with little animations on the page and clickable words and stuff, including 3 tiny minigames like whitewashing the fence, but it also came with a unique 3 level game called Tom Sawyer's Incredible Adventure. There is no dump of this CD online as far as I can tell. Sadly my parents threw out all my childhood stuff in the '00s. This little game is the earliest game I can remember beating 100% so it has a lot of nostalgia value for me. Searching for it online I've seen it holds a similar value for other people as well. On top of that, it is unnecessarily good, the dev must have had fun making it. It was one of those bonus games with almost no educational value whatsoever included by angelic devs for the poor kids whose parents wouldn't buy them real games.

Anyway, all is not lost as Europress had many CDs for their magazines and such that advertised their product library. One of these is the Big Bonus CD which is available on archive.org. Tom Sawyer's Incredible Adventure is included on this compilation.

To summarise the objective, in The Adventures of Tom Sawyer Tom is put on trial for a murder committed by Injun Joe. Tom testifies about this and subsequently fears for his life as Joe goes into hiding. This ultimately leads to Tom and Becky encountering Joe by chance after getting lost on a picnic to a cave. When they eventually return to the town, the judge decides to lock the cave and discovers Joe dead of starvation at the entrance. Tom Sawyer's Incredible Adventure is set in that cave.

As far as I know the only way to play this is using a Win95 virtual machine or DOSbox. Here is a timestamped video of someone playing it briefly:



I tend to have an attitude towards SM64 ROM hacking that anything is possible now there's decomp, but DOS is totally out of my wheelhouse. I figured this is a good place to ask - is there a way to port this to something that will play on modern PC's? Like an in-browser version or something? I'd love to shine a light on this little game and make it easily accessible for others to play at the same time. I think it was made using Klik & Play.

[Doublewhammy]

I had no idea they did scholastic book clubs for Australians too.

[Halamix2]

Analysis:
CD contains one data track and 24 audio tracks, CD-Audio quality (16bit, 44100Hz), that's nice.

Yeah, file extensions suggest Klik & Play or some newer Clicteam game creator tool (The Games Factory and such).

This isn't a typical MS-DOS game, `file` returns `MS-DOS executable, NE version 5 for MS Windows 3.10 (EXE) (GUI)`, so it's a Windows 3.11 executable; pure DOS couldn't load dll files.

If I remember correctly most of the game (all of it?) is stored in the .cca files, there are tools for newer editors that can decompile them info the editor .gam/.tga files, check if CEXtract can do somethign with the .cca files: kippykip .com/threads/cextract-the-games-factory-multimedia-fusion-game-extractor-unprotector.498

This tool requires Msvbvm60.dll to start, and it looks like it can extract *something*, but I don't know how much, as I'm currently on Linux and it might not work as expected; have a little bit of fun with this tool and experiment. If the builtin KnP -> TGF conversion tool works then you should be able to edit the source data in he Games Factory and export a win32 .exe. Or Import it in even newer tool, or simply read the code and recreate it in any other engine or language.

That's all I can say for now, I won't try to decompile/convert it further