I'm a fan of the T7G franchise to say the least. I bought this mostly because I got the 66% off deal and because I like the game. I didn't expect all that much from the re-release. I'm just a collector I guess.

It would be VERY hard to do a true re-master on this game. The original bluescreen footage is MIA so, there is no way to even try for a real HD upscale in that regard. I'm not sure how the game could be retouched or improved without access to those original assets. Even if you manage to export the original videos out of their 1990s proprietary formatting, and there are utilities out there which can, you are still stuck with a resolution only suitable for 1990s CD technology. This means even an upscaling of the original in-game footage would be based on a blocky/pixelated original product unless someone had the original bluescreen footage and re-rendered the entire game using modern technology.

While people can understandably frown on Mojotouch's techniques, I'm still happy to get the improved audio and the other goodies bundled with the game.

So while I can understand people being upset to a certain extent, I also don't know what can be expected in terms of improvements. Either way, I'm happy to have it because I grew up with the game and enjoy seeing different versions of it.

While the FMV sequences might indeed be a tad hard to remaster without the original footage, there has been some pretty good progress in a neural network based upscale. A while ago there was a fan mod release for Final Fantasy 7, where the backgrounds were upscaled to higher resolution using such a scaler and the end result is pretty amazing.

Here is a video of it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HHy-pe37_FU

Amazingly enough, the upscaling has actually added more details to the old pixelated 3D renders, which in itself is pretty unbelievable. Of course, it takes work. as each background image has to be scaled and checked for errors, but this is basically the right way of doing an upscaled re-master.

I was just thinking along those lines. There may be a possibility of doing just that, now that I think of it. There are utilities out there which can export the raw video and audio out of The 7th Guest/The 11th Hour. I wonder if using that, with something like waifu2-caffe might be able to generate some good results. The problem is, there isn't a tool to re-create the original container files.

Might be worth trying though, especially given that EVERYTHING in both games is pre-rendered video, from movement to the video scenes. I can see there being some potential problems with The 11th Hour in the menus and gamebook video playback scenes.

Yep. That, plus there are a lot of people...and businesses...who are very dissatisfied with Win10 (mainly due to the new "upgrades" model, which entirely lacks transparency and often totally breaks previously-working HW and SW. I have a Win10 laptop which, after the latest "unannounced forced update" (which took over the machine at 2pm and didn't allow normal use again until after 4pm) no longer has any working USB. INCLUDING "built-in" devices, like the bluetooth adapter and camera. All the USB hardware is working... tested off a boot disk, and a bootable thumb drive... but in Win10, they are totally broken, and after 3x weeks, I still haven't managed to get it working again. So, I'm 100% on Win7 at the moment, on the last hardware formally supported.

This is a lot more common than you may have heard, and is costing businesses a boatload of cash. So, there's renewed demand for NEW Win7 machines... and will be until MS gets its collective cranium out of its collective rectal cavity and fixes the problem... which means abandoning a big part of their strategy, and thus won't happen easily.

Win10, at the core, is pretty good. The new shell still sucks, but there are ways to fix that. But the "surprise! We own your machine, and we're gonna break it, cuz we can!!!" is a show-stopper for a LOT of people. I'd never trust it exclusively... not as it stands today.

if it is true i am very interested in it, i found this mobo: Asrock H310M-HDV motherboard socket 1151
and it seems there are more H310M boards, some have extra numbers or letters , are they all the same and win7 64 bits compatible or does it need a specific one to make sure it is 100% compatible.
which processors will also work 100%? : seems the older 6 and 7 are quite hard to get in our country, cause many stores mainly sell 8 like 8400, 8500 and a few 7: like 7500. True, cause Mickeysloth will never admit they were 'wrong' , afterall they are the ones that decide whhat windoze users will use cause if there is only one choice : evil win 10 ( with lots of pro and enterprise versions) we, the poor sheep have to use it or turn linux and thats to diffiuclt for millions of standard users like myself , its too hard to switch after >20 years using windoze.

Anyway, it has always been a stubborn company , but since the change of shift, a new See iew O, and new 'visions' things turn out a mess,( seems they are playing around > 2 years now and still many 'updates' totally 'destroy' the PC
so in a way they waste so much vaulable time, they should go back releasing a new windows every x number of years cause as it is now it doesnt work .

Mickeysloth wont listen to the users, not refering to the users that never complain and simply buy the new windows, cause" there is nothing we can do to change that" and they are 100% right we cant do ships a bout it :D BUT we can always try, and stop behaving like sheeps, following the flock ...

Anyway, thanks for the reply and information,.

I found this side-by-side comparison of the original and remastered version of The 7th Guest:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5IxZIQroQfc

The most notable differences to me are smother camera animations as well as quicker animations when moving around in the house. I can't say I see the "shit smear" filter, maybe someone knows of a suitable screenshot that demonstrates this?

It seems as if the filter is hard to notice at all. The comments in your linked video are saying the same. Anyway - I just installed my own retail copy of the game using ScummVM and with it I was able to have the same fluid movement as in the video simply by checking that option in the ScummVM config. Only downside is that it is English only.

With todays technology it should be trivial to increase the details and res with something like a photoshop tool.

Sounds like even a few bucks is too much for this when you own the original release, similar to Simon the Sorcerer. Thanks for the feedback everyone.

I see, thanks! I think I'll stick with the original then. Other languages aren't that important to me, though I understand they can be to other people.

Thanks for the link. Yeah it seems to be just faster animation so that's an improvement but everything else has been left as it is. Some good extras but not sure it's enough to justify purchasing. This company need to be providing more of a remaster.

No it is not. You can achieve the same with ScummVM (don't know which version GOG is using) by simply checking "fast videos" in the config screen.

^ I can confirm what Marko is saying - if you open ScummVM, select The 7th Guest, click on the "Edit Game..." then select the "Engine" tab, you'll see "Fast Move Speed" option has been there for years which does exactly the same thing.

I managed to export a few frames from the container files in the original game files. (I still have the CDs so, pretty pure source)

I ran one of the frames through an online version of waifu2x-caffe.

1. You can't get a "true" HD picture due to the original 640*320 aspect ratio, at least, not with the "out of the box" settings.
2. It DOES upscale the BMP of the video frame nicely but, even with AI you can't polish the image itself all that much.
3. Even though there are ways to get things OUT of the container files, getting them back in...well, that is a different story.

Here is a comparison between the original and 3x upsize. So, you can upscale the original game content using AI technology! However, it can only clean it up so much in the resizing.

https://waifu2x.me/compare.html?before=d3dd64d5-e57d-4644-c668-2ea5be25a9cd_origin.png&after=d3dd64d5-e57d-4644-c668-2ea5be25a9cd.png

I'll also note that this one VDX file has 533 BMP frames plus audio. There are 98 of these VDX files in the Intro RL/GJD container set. The RL file is a heading file for the matching GJD file. So, you have containers within containers. There are obviously multiple paired RL/GJD files which contain all of the VDX files for the game, which, in turn, contain all the still images, video frames, and non-MIDI audio for the game.

You could have someone try to manually clean up each BMP of the game in Photoshop prior to attempting the resize but, that would take an exorbitant amount of time and effort. 533 frames in ONE VDX. Now imagine trying to mask out Stauf compared to the background and trying to clean both up. It would be nuts, even for that one scene unless there is yet another AI or batch tool that could do it.

I guess another possible work-around would be to export the VDX video contents as an AVI instead of the BMPs. Even then, you'd need to use masking and such for each video and re-export out to a lossless image format that Waifu2x could then upscale, and reassemble the video from those.

There are tools out there to export the VDX files from the RL/GJD combinations and then to export the BMP and audio from the VDX files. However, there isn't any utility to perform the opposite task. If there was, well, we might be able to do a full up-scale of the game into near-HD quality based on the original game images. I do like that idea but, you still wouldn't get a huge ROI on image quality itself, except maybe in the stand-alone 3D mansion animation scenes. I haven't found/tried one of those yet.

We could also re-master ALL the non-MIDI audio files and possibly replace some of the WAV-based sound effects, like moving the cans in the pantry, as well.

(I obviously am NOT a fan of this game franchise, nope, not at all :D )

Actually, looking at the spec for GROOVIE, the engine T7G is built on, it might not be as easy as I thought. There are PLENTY of applications that can read and export from VDX but, none that can go back. This might be because part of the HEX in the code determines what areas are "clickable" in the game, based on the 640*320 frame size. So, you'd need to somehow extrapolate that information to the newer frame size.

Again, this is probably why RL/GJD files and the VDX files within can't just be "edited". Sure, you can export them but, there isn't an easy way back. Several applications can read/export from the formats though.

The only other thing I can think of would be to export literally all the game assets and then basically use them to rebuild the game in another engine. However, that would also mean re-coding all of the puzzles, re-adding all of the MIDI in all the right places, and ensuring the game assets all work the same. I don't know that the animations for the puzzles themselves were pre-rendered, only the house movement and FMV scenes.

That is, unless we could figure out how everything is encoded and reproduce it for a higher frame size. Even then, would the puzzles render the same?

Darn it all!

Why do I even try to think through these things!? I'm not a coder or game developer...LOL. I think it could be figured out though, given what we know about the GROOVIE engine.