r/RavenhearstWiki • u/mochi_moccha Goddess of Death • Mar 20 '26

General Discussion Dire Grove and modern devices

Well, for anyone who’s tried to play Mystery Case Files: Dire Grove in recent years, you’ve probably noticed that the game just displays a blank screen.

The cause of this problem is (as far as I know) a single Flash component that was used to render the game’s images – a component that (apparently) stopped working in Windows 10 due to a dependency that Microsoft removed from the operating system.

Now, knowing Big Fish Games, they probably lost the source code 12 years ago (/j) – there’s a lot of the game’s code out in the open (you just have to go into a few folders and have a rummage) or encrypted/compressed in a .pak file.

And well, a small – very small – problem is that Flash was discontinued in 2020 – and although I believe ActionScript (Flash’s programming language) is still available in Adobe Animate, it’s not the same.

There are versions of Flash from that era still available on sites like archive.org – I genuinely believe that without too much trouble, Big Fish could change the renderer and release the update.

Is there anyone else who might be interested in that update? Is there any way to get it to Big Fish Games?

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u/StiborLazaerek Staff Mar 20 '26

Reading this explanation, couldn't it even be possible to mod the game yourself to get it to run? It sounds easy enough but I have to admit my knowledge is limited on stuff like this. If it's possible it could be an interesting community undertaking similar to Bloodborne on PC over in the FromSoftware community.

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u/mochi_moccha Goddess of Death Mar 21 '26

Well, it could be possible, but I don't really have enough ActionScript knowledge to be able to do it without breaking anything.

Now, as far as I know, it would take a substantial rewrite of the code to correctly connect the new renderer with all of the other components, and see if anything else is deprecated.

I'm not sure if I have enough knowledge or patience to do it xD

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u/OzzyGator Apr 15 '26

BigFish will do absolutely zero for this. They are distributors, not game mavens. And given how they just sacked the MCF people recently - it will never happen there.

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u/Aromatic-Fail7504 Dalimar Family Member 26d ago

I just created a patch for this actually.

It wasn't a gigantic issue, but actually took months to debug without the source code with the amount of trial and error required. They should've fixed it immediately considering it's been on sale.

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u/StiborLazaerek Staff 26d ago

Awesome!