Cheats and Easter Eggs

1. You might like to try clicking on the seat area of the bathroom chair seven times prior to clicking on the toilet at the first occasion Adrienne uses that facility in any chapter [My thanks to Ben and Lauren Brown for this solution]. The door will be closed in your face as usual, but, instead of a long and uneventful wait outside, you will hear astonishingly detailed toilet using sound effects! These may include groaning as if indicating constipation, farting, and sounds of defecation and urination! At the end, Adrienne may be heard to remark, "How odd" or a contented "Ahhhhh"! Naturally, the regular toilet flushing and hand washing noises are still heard at the appropriate points.

   According to Raul Alvarez Garcia and Stavros Karatsoridis, the voice that says "How odd" is actually that of Princess Rosella from another Sierra title - King's Quest 7. Andri Hansen disagrees and thinks it is Queen Valanice from that same game. I've always thought it is Adrienne who speaks.

   There appear to be several variant results of this one "Easter Egg", so you should try to hear them all by saving a game right before Adrienne is about to use the toilet for the first time in any chapter and keep exiting to the main menu (select "Leave bookmark in prior position") and reloading that unchanged game after you have done the cheat until you are sure you have heard everything. As a matter of interest, some of the groans are actually those of Harriet from chapter three! You will undoubtedly find that Sierra has gone to great pains to set up this "egg", so it is the responsibility of all dedicated players of Phantasmagoria to activate it and activate it often!

2. If you go to the nursery on the third floor in any chapter apart from chapter seven and click on the baby picture four times in succession, its eyes will glow and an evil childish laugh will be heard. Adrienne does not respond to this phenomenon.

3. Pictures of some of the babes from the Sierra game Leisure Suit Larry 6 (such as Shamara and Thunderbird) may be seen in the realtor's office in town. [Michael Hofmeyr]

4. The music playing in the background of the Nipawomsett General Store was also taken from the Leisure Suit Larry series.

5. At seemingly random occasions, just after Adrienne enters the antiques store in town, Phantasmagoria designer Roberta Williams can be seen walking past outside. She is alone, has short brown hair, and wears a white cardigan and black pants. [Andy Bellatti]

6. The hole Adrienne creates by removing the library fireplace bricks that block access to the chapel looks suspiciously like the mountain depicted on the Sierra logo. This would explain why some bricks are split in half for no apparent reason. [Lou-Ann]

7. Using the drain cleaner on the manacles in the cellar will result in patches of "blood" appearing on Adrienne's head and shoes. [Corrine Wilson] and [David O'Connor] Corrine adds that the blood-like speckles will also appear if you click on the drain cleaner while Adrienne is in the pantry and has the light turned on. In contrast with the cellar situation, there are no changes to Adrienne's head but there is more blood on her shoes.

8. A strange picture may be seen in chapter three during the conversation with Malcolm. Many framed photographs have been placed on top of the shelves by the fireplace to the right of the screen. One of these "photographs" is actually a green and black image of the popular stereotype of a space alien. [Chewbacca]

A:

Here is an undocumented debugging feature that will be of interest to those who want to know a bit more about the VMD movie files.

1. Go to the Phantasmagoria directory on your hard drive to edit either of the PHCD.BAT game startup files. Locate the copy you normally use to start the game.
2. Open this file and find the line beginning with the full path to the SIERRA executable (it should be similar to c:\sierra\scarydos\sierra....).
3. Put an extra space between the end of the first listed file pathname and the second; then type -V (capitalisation is important). Ensure there is a further space between the -V and the rest of the line.
   - Modified PHCD.BAT file taken from my own MS-DOS installation of Phantasmagoria -
   

   @echo off 
   cd \GAMES\PHANTAS 
   call CheckCD   E 
   @if exist vesadrv.bat call vesadrv.bat 
   D:\GAMES\PHANTAS\sierra.exe -V D:\GAMES\PHANTAS\resource.cfg
   :end 
   cd .. 
   

4. Start Phantasmagoria using the modified batch file and view some VMD movies such as the Game and most chapter introductions.
5. At the conclusion of each movie, a small white box containing black writing will appear in the middle of the screen which details the number of frames in the file you have just watched along with the number of frames that were skipped. Quite ominously, the box is titled "Alert", but there is absolutely no danger in causing it to appear.
6. To resume play, press Enter or the Esc key.
7. When you are finished experimenting with this feature, simply remove the -V addition from PHCD.BAT - do not remove the entire line!

If you have installed Phantasmagoria as a Windows program, edit the command line used to start the game (this will be found in the properties dialogue box of its startup file) instead of the batch file mentioned above.

B:

This feature is particularly useful for those who want to ensure they have not missed anything or want to get to any of the key video scenes without having to play or replay the game.

All video scenes in Phantasmagoria are one of two types. The most elaborate and dramatic are usually represented in VMD (Video and Music Data) files. Examples include the introductions to the game and chapters one, two, three, four, five, and seven; all murders and direct demon involvement scenes, and the panoramic views of the reception hall and theatre. They are entirely self-contained (providing you view them using the method outlined below), holding information regarding the actors, props, backgrounds, and the DAC based soundtracks and sound effects. The others, which include scenes ranging from Adrienne conversing with the realtor to merely opening a door or drawer, are known as robot or RBT files. If these are viewed outside of their proper game context, all you will see are the actors and some props. There is speech and sound effects, but no background music which would be MIDI based anyway and is obviously contained within a separate file (probably RESSCI.*). Sets are non-existent, transparent backgrounds being the norm. RBTs are normally transposed onto large, static, predrawn backgrounds stored inside RESSCI.*. Any representative of both of these file types may be viewed out of its normal game context if you follow these directions:

1. Go to the Phantasmagoria directory on your hard drive to edit the RESOURCE.* (i.e: RESOURCE.CFG or RESOURCE.WIN) configuration file.
2. Open this file and find the lines beginning with movieDir= and robot=.
3. For each line, add a full directory path name just after the equals sign that points to a location somewhere on your hard drive, preferably a newly created temporary directory. Follow this with a semicolon.
   - Example of modified movieDir= and robot= lines -

   movieDir=C:\temp;E:\vmd 
   robot=C:\temp;E:\patches;E:\robot 
   

4. To be able to view every scene, you will need at least eighty-two megabytes of free hard disk space (assuming you delete each video file that you copy to your hard drive immediately after viewing it to make room for another one), although around half this amount is quite adequate for all but the VMD scene covering Adrienne's second visit to Malcolm.
5. To view any VMD file, copy it from the Phantasmagoria cd of your choice (VMDs are located in the \VMD directory) into the directory referred to in step 3 and rename it 10.VMD. Now, insert cd #1 into your cd-rom drive and watch the game's "Introduction"!
6. To view the RBT scenes, copy any two robot files from the Phantasmagoria cd of your choice (RBTs are located in the \ROBOT directory) into the directory referred to in step 3 and rename them 91.RBT (usually the Sierra logo) and 90.RBT (usually the flickering word "Phantasmagoria"). Now, insert any Phantasmagoria cd into your cd-rom drive and start the game. Be sure not to press the Esc key after you do this. Instead of the Sierra logo, you should see whatever RBT file you renamed 91.RBT. This should be followed by whatever RBT file you renamed 90.RBT rather than the word "Phantasmagoria" flickering across the screen.
7. When you are finished experimenting with this feature, you may delete the additions you made to the RESOURCE.* file, but that is not really necessary because, unlike cheat A detailed above, Phantasmagoria will play quite normally as long as it does not find any required VMD or RBT files on your hard drive.

Variations of this procedure include replacing any file with another simply by copying it to the designated hard drive directory and renaming it as appropriate. Under this method, you will have to play the game up to a particular point. Who says Adrienne has to see a vision of Marie and Gaston attempting to murder Carno while exploring the theatre's stage? [copy a VMD file other than 5460.VMD to the indicated directory and rename it 5460.VMD] Why can't Adrienne be shown from the waist up in the realtor's office - floating in mid air and flipping through the Illusionist Quarterly? [copy 2040.RBT from cd #1 to your hard drive as above and rename it 1808.RBT] Have fun! Unfortunately, you still cannot view any letter or journal article this way as these static graphics are likely contained within the same file on each cd (RESSCI.*) as the environmental backgrounds onto which the RBT files are transposed.

How to view the Phantasmagoria 2 DUK movies outside of their proper game context

VMD file viewer designed by a German programmer/Phantasmagoria fan. Download and install both files.
VMD viewer  WING Library

C:

The file RESOURCE.SFX that exists on each Phantasmagoria cd-rom disk but whose contents vary in each case is actually a compilation of 16-bit WAV sound files that may be extracted to your hard drive by following the procedure detailed here (strictly DOS and Windows users only).

1. Ensure you have at least 40Mb of free space on your hard drive.
2. Download the program fm-ext (c. 19 Kb ZIP file). This is a freeware file extraction tool that was developed by an unknown programmer. Expand it into a newly created directory - C:\EXTRACT - for the purposes of this discussion.
3. Copy the RESOURCE.SFX file from the root directory of any Phantasmagoria cd to C:\EXTRACT.
4. Start fm-ext.exe and type in the filename resource.sfx.
5. Answer Y (for yes) to all questions.
6. Accept the default filename or type in a new one (with the same .WAV extension).
7. Press Enter after you have made your decision.
8. Repeat steps 5-7 until the extraction process (scan) is complete.
9. Press the Esc key to exit fm-ext.
10. Play the newly extracted WAV files using Windows Media Player or a similar program. Most are simply miscellaneous sound effects that could not be properly incorporated into a VMD or RBT video, but the largest WAV file within the copy of RESOURCE.SFX on cd#7 is the closing theme song Take a Stand (10.66Mb), and the second largest file (the largest on cds #1-6) is the opening menu theme Consumite Furore (5.89Mb). Thus, you will be able to listen to the two Phantasmagoria songs whenever you want without having to start up the game!

Regrettably, I have had no luck with processing the other Phantasmagoria game files using fm-ext. Obtaining any of the MIDI tunes using this technique is truly impossible. Fortunately, there is no reason not to try to extract music, etc. from the files of other games if you wish. For example, you can extract not only many of the sound effects, but also all the background music (there are no MIDIs) from Phantasmagoria 2 using the method outlined here (but please note you will need to have much more hard drive space available). It is not possible to extract any sound or music from the *.VMD, *.RBT, or *.DUK video files...however, you can always record the audio from these movies onto a cassette tape.

As an interesting footnote, if you use fm-ext on any Phantasmagoria 2 DUK movie file, you will extract an AVI video of the same size as the DUK but it will not be playable. This is no different to simply renaming a DUK file with an AVI extension. To play the DUKs outside of the game or to play an "extracted" AVI file at all, you need a special codec (vids:DUCK) that is not available to the general public. The file 7600.AVI on cd#4 serves no useful purpose and is just a renamed version of 7600.DUK.

D:

The file RESOURCE.AUD that exists on each Phantasmagoria cd-rom disk and whose content never varies is actually one huge RAW sound file that holds all the words spoken by the "Official Hintkeeper" throughout the game. If you want to hear these statements, one after the other, please read this section.

1. Copy the file RESOURCE.AUD from any Phantasmagoria cd to your hard drive.
2. Rename this copy of RESOURCE.AUD to RESOURCE.RAW.
3. Open a DAC sound editing program such as Creative Wave Studio or GoldWave.
4. Load the file RESOURCE.RAW as stereo-11KHz-8 bit.
5. Play the file. There will be a considerable amount of static but you should be able to distinguish the words of the Hintkeeper. He recites: instructions for enabling and disabling Phantasmagoria's internal censoring system, hints on what to do next in the various chapters, the names of the inventory objects, and even the advice at the end of chapter 7 that is only communicated as text while playing the game!

One of the implications of this discovery is that Sierra must have used a very obscure DAC playing technique to be able to have the Hintkeeper communicate his words so clearly during gameplay. Also, it is now obvious that the only possible remaining location of the MIDI tunes must be the various RESSCI.* files. For Phantasmagoria 2, follow the instructions listed above but import as a stereo-22KHz-16 bit sound file. In this case, the words will be very clear and have nothing whatsoever to do with hints.

E:

The directory where you installed Phantasmagoria contains the file PDOCO.TXT. This plain text file is displayed whenever you select "About" from the opening menu. You may replace the original file with one of your own.

1. Back up the original PDOCO.TXT file by copying it to a different directory.
2. Create a new plain text file or find an existing plain text file you would like to use to replace the original PDOCO.TXT. Ideally, this file should contain information you will find useful while playing the game such as a Phantasmagoria walkthrough.
3. Copy your new PDOCO.TXT file to your Phantasmagoria directory.
4. Play Phantasmagoria and, whenever you want to read the PDOCO.TXT file, simply exit to the opening menu and select the "About" option.
5. To restore the original PDOCO.TXT file, simply copy it back into your Phantasmagoria directory.

This trick concludes the "Undocumented Features" section. I hope you have found these tips interesting and useful so that you will get greater enjoyment than ever out of your Phantasmagoria gaming purchases.

VMD Movie List

This page comprehensively describes the contents and file details of all the VMD movies.

CD 1 RBT Files

Short descriptions and file details of all the CD 1 RBT videos.

Contents

Title - Introduction - Gameplay - Plot Synopsis - Sound and Visual Effects - Main Characters - Censorship Issues - Miscellanea

< Phantasmagoria 2 Overview Memorial Web Subsite >

[ Frames view | Comments? | Exit frames ]

© Anthony Larme 1998
(larme@hotmail.com)

https://anthonylarme.tripod.com/phantas/phcheats.html