ScummVM

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ScummVM
ScummVM

GUI of ScummVM
Developer: ScummVM Team
Latest release: 0.9.1 / October 29, 2006
OS: Cross-platform
Use: Interpreter
License: GPL
Website: www.scummvm.org

ScummVM (Script Creation Utility for Maniac Mansion Virtual Machine) is a multi-platform stack-based virtual machine which was originally made to allow one to play LucasArts adventure games that use the SCUMM system on platforms other than those for which they were originally released. It also supports a variety of non-SCUMM games by companies like Revolution Software and Adventure Soft. It is not an emulator.

ScummVM is free software, released under the terms of the GNU GPL. It was originally written by Ludvig Strigeus. See history of ScummVM on ScummVM Wiki.

ScummVM has been accepted to participate in the Google Summer of Code 2007. For reference, visit the project ideas page.

Contents

[edit] Platforms officially supported by ScummVM

Portability being a design goal, ports of ScummVM are available for:

[edit] Platforms supported by unofficial ScummVM ports

[edit] Games supported by ScummVM

Not all games are finishable or even playable. Some of them are still very much works-in-progress. For a complete, up-to-date list, see the official ScummVM compatibility chart.

[edit] LucasArts SCUMM games

[edit] Games by other developers

Various games by Humongous Entertainment use the SCUMM engine, and are therefore playable with ScummVM. ScummVM also supports the following non-SCUMM games:

[edit] Games in earlier support stages

The following games have been added to ScummVM's Subversion tree. [1] However, the engines may be in various states of operation and are not guaranteed to ever be finished. The ScummVM Team has stated that they will not respond to questions about unfinished engines.

Another World was integrated for a short period of time causing a brief but heated discussion, ranging from emotional to purely technical aspects. Some felt it was more of an action game than an adventure game, others worried that ScummVM, being geared towards bitmapped graphics, really was not the ideal platform for a polygon-based game. The discussion was rendered moot when the raw project was officially closed by its author, at the request of Eric Chahi. [2]

Operation Stealth and Future Wars support was added by integrating another stand-alone recreation of their engine: cinE. [3]

Games that are not officially supported but may run:
Gob engine

  • Bargon Attack
  • Ween - The Prophecy

AGOS engine

[edit] Possible future games

The following games will be supported once the team receives the source code:

Discworld 1 & 2 were accepted as future supported games in ScummVM, and they will be implemented after the developers receive the source code. All legal negotiations have been completed, but there have been problems obtaining the source code from the only person currently known to have it. Some effort is being put into locating a second copy of the source code. There is a reverse engineering effort in progress for the engine of both games, the Tinsel engine.

It has also been mentioned in the forums that some people are coding engines for Kingdom O' Magic and Curse of Enchantia (small steps have even been taken to code a Toonstruck engine), but this has not yet been added to their wiki or confirmed by a project leader.

[edit] AGI engine addition

On 2006-05-24 the Adventure Game Interpreter engine was added. It is based on Sarien code, an AGI interpreter, but sadly outdated and known for being buggy in some ways (which is now being solved in the new ScummVM engine). The ScummVM's AGI engine is in an early phase of conversion to C++ and is being improved in many ways. The Sarien project stopped its development, continuing the development into ScummVM's AGI engine. There has also been discussions regarding the possible implementation of TrollVM into ScummVM, for playing pre-AGI games.

[edit] Getting the games

Due to copyright restrictions, ScummVM does not include the game data, so users have to own copies of the games. The age of the original releases means that many of them are available in relatively cheap compilations, such as the LucasArts Classics collection.

During the development cycle leading up to the 0.5.0 release on August 2, 2003, game manufacturer Revolution Software not only helped ScummVM developers add support for their adventure Beneath a Steel Sky by supplying them with the original source code, but also decided to release both the CD and the floppy version of the game as freeware, available for download on the ScummVM website. A few months later, the owners of Flight of the Amazon Queen made it freeware in very much the same way.

Unfortunately the cut scenes from Broken Sword 1 and 2 do not work "out of the box". This is due to their cut scenes being encoded in the Smacker format, which requires specialised software to be decoded. RAD Game Tools is unwilling to open up the older versions of the Smacker video format and has asked the ScummVM team to not reverse-engineer it[citation needed]. Revolution Software however, has allowed the re-encoded versions of these cut scenes to be downloaded for free from the ScummVM website.

[edit] See also

Portal:Free software
 Free software Portal
Portal:Video games
 Video games Portal

[edit] External links

Wikimedia Commons has media related to:
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