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ScummVM

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ScummVM is a multi-platform stack-based virtual machine which allows one to play LucasArts adventure games (now a wide list of graphic adventures by other companies like Revolution Software and Adventure Soft, that uses non-SCUMM engines) which use the SCUMM system on platforms other than those where versions were originally released. It also supports a variety of non-SCUMM games. 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.

Contents

Platforms officially supported by ScummVM

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

Platforms supported by unofficial ScummVM ports

Games supported by ScummVM

Not all games are completable or even playable. Some of them are work in progress. For a complete, up-to-date list, see [the official ScummVM compatibility chart].

LucasArts SCUMM games

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:

Games in earlier support stages

The following games have been added to ScummVM's Subversion tree. [link] 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 wasn't the ideal platform for a polygon-based game. Additionally, the game engine was still being actively developed outside of ScummVM as the raw project, which was probably the main reason why support for it was dropped.

The discussion was rendered moot when the raw project was officially closed by its author, at the request of Eric Chahi. [link]

Possible future games

The following games are in planning phase of being supported waiting for receiving the source code after the legal approval of their owners:

Discworld 1 & 2 games were accepted as future supported games in ScummVM and the implementation work will be done after receiving the source code. All legal negotiations are done, but the team has still not received the code. There have been problems obtaining the source code from the only current person known to have it, and some effort is being put into locating a second copy of the source code.

AGI engine addition

At 2006-05-24 the Adventure Game Interpreter engine was added. It's based on Sarien code, an AGI interpreter, but sadly outdated and known for being buggy in some ways (that now it's being solved in the new ScummVM engine). The ScummVM's AGI engine is in an early phase of converting to C++ and improving it in many ways (like fixing bugs). Sarien project stopped it's development, continuing the development into ScummVM's AGI engine.

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 free software, available for download on the ScummVM website. A few months later, the owners of Flight of the Amazon Queen made it free software 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. Revolution Software however, has allowed the re-encoded versions of these cut scenes to be downloaded for free from the ScummVM website.

See also

External links

Wikimedia Commons has media related to:
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