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Re-implementation of the game Private Eye (1996) 🕵️

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re-private-eye

The development of this re-implementation was moved to this scummvm branch. The Python version won't be updated.

This open-source project aims to be a modern engine re-implementation for "Private Eye" from 1996 by Brooklyn Multimedia. The first iteration is written in Python and uses pygame and SDL2. It should run in Windows, Linux, and MacOS.

This project is open for collaboration. If you are interested, please open an issue about it.

Only the English version of the game is supported. Localized versions (e.g. Spanish, French, etc) have game assets in a binarized format that it is not so easy to parse. However, if you own the English version and some localized version, you can still play installing the english one but then using the CD of your localized version.

Current status

Somehow playable: at least the first scenes can be played, but (most likely) the game is not completable. Saving and loading a game is implemented, but there is only one slot. However, some important gameplay elements are incomplete:

  • Inventory
  • Diary

Also, less important, but not implemented yet:

  • Demo mode
  • Original savegame interface and retro-compatibility

Finally, this re-implementation adds the following new features:

  • Crossplatform support!
  • Any screen resolution with scale2x (not only 640x480 as the original implementation).

Project dependencies

To install the dependencies, just use pip3 install lark pygame ffpyplayer --user --upgrade.

Playing with the engine

Using the full game:

  1. Mount/load the CDROM.
  2. Install the game (you can use wine or just extract support/assets.z using unshieldv3).
  3. From the game directory where it was installed, run python3 start.py path/to/cdrom

Using the demo:

If you don't own the full game, you can still play with this engine using the free demo following these steps:

mkdir demo
cd demo
wget "https://archive.org/download/PrivateEye_1020/PVT_DEMO.zip"
unzip -LL PVT_DEMO.zip
git clone https://github.com/wfr/unshieldv3
cd unshieldv3
qmake .
make
cd ..
mkdir assets
./unshieldv3/unshieldv3 extract support/assets.z assets/
python ../start.py .