Twenty years ago today...

[sev]

Twenty years ago today, on Tue Oct 9 16:30:12 2001, Ludvig Strigeus pushed the initial revision of the ScummVM code, which was version 0.0.1 of the project. Time flew quickly and, fast-forward to the present day, we are proudly releasing ScummVM 2.5.0 “Twenty years ago today…”

The list of changes is tremendous.

First of all, this is the first release that supports 2.5D games (almost 3D), thanks to the merger with ResidualVM. With this release we announce support for Grim Fandango, The Longest Journey and Myst 3: Exile. This is why we jumped straight to 2.5 in our versioning. Please note that only desktop platforms currently support these games and other platforms may or may not gain the support later depending on their capabilities.

In addition to these 3 games and engines, we officially support 10 more new engines and subengines that add compatibility with the following games:

• Little Big Adventure
• Red Comrades 1: Save the Galaxy
• Red Comrades 2: For the Great Justice
• Transylvania
• Crimson Crown
• OO-Topos
• Glulx interactive fiction games
• Private Eye
• AGS Games versions 2.5+
• Nightlong: Union City Conspiracy
• The Journeyman Project 2: Buried in Time
• Crusader: No Remorse
• L-ZONE
• _paceship Warlock

We love localized game releases and multiple platform versions, thus with this release, we enhanced the support for Lure of the Temptress Konami release, Blue Force Spanish, Ringworld Spanish, Amazon: Guardians of Eden Spanish, Mystery House French, Russian translations of Sierra AGI games, Elvira 1 Japanese PC-98, Bargon Attack Russian, Woodruff Russian, Eye of the Beholder Japanese Sega-CD, Legend of Kyrandia Hebrew, Legend of Kyrandia 2 Hebrew, Legend of Kyrandia 3 Simplified Chinese, Inherit the Earth PC-98 Japanese, Gabriel Knight 1 Macintosh, Xeen Russian to name but a few. Notably, Macintosh b/w versions of Loom and Indy 3 are now also supported.

Besides the new games and game versions, ScummVM 2.5.0 brings many notable improvements and new features. We have completed a major rework of the GUI: We now support Unicode characters everywhere. The GUI also adapts to high resolutions used in HiDPI screens. The Nintendo DS port has been significantly rewritten. We added GOG and Steam achievements to a large number of Wintermute games and enabled KeyMapper in more games. Thanks to the work of one of our GSoC students, we have now added an option for text-to-speech to the games Sfinx, Soltys and The Griffon Legend.

You may find all of this goodness available to a number of platforms on our downloads page, or let the autoupdater kick in on Macintosh and Windows.

We wish you great adventuring, happy puzzle-solving and exciting journeys to RPG worlds, and hope to see you around in the coming years.

And by the way, GOG.com is running a special promo tied to the release and our anniversary, where you can buy many ScummVM-supported games at a discount.

[nozomi]

Another Amazing release! Thanks.

It seem the Might and Magic titles are broken in this release. Tested "World of Xeen", "Sword of Xeen" and "Might and Magic V: Dark Side of Xeen" All three give the follow error and crash..."ERROR: Could not open file - CONSTANTS_5!"

Tested with the MacOS intel build and the Android ARMv7a build.

[eriktorbjorn]

Notably, Macintosh b/w versions of Loom and Indy 3 are now also supported.

Just to clarify, what this refers to is that the old 16-colour versions of these two particular Macintosh versions now have an optional black-and-white rendering mode called "Macintosh b/w" in the Render mode dropdown. This was added as an afterthought while adding support for the high-resolution fonts, but as it turns out there was actually an eight year old feature request for it that has now finally been implemented. This would not have been easily possible had it not been for the hard work of others, adding support for reading and understanding Macintosh resources.

Loom should be fully supported, but since I've never played the game on real hardware it's hard to be sure. Bug reports are welcome. The GUI and (probably) music for Indy 3 are completely different from the original, but the game should still work better than it used it. Unfortunately, these versions are not widely available. The Mac versions sold e.g. on Steam are later, 256-colour versions. They're supported too, of course, but lack the unique features of the old 16-colour versions.

While it's of course great to see new games being supported, it's very nice to see some of the older engines receiving fixes. For the SCUMM engine alone, off the top of my head I can think of a few minor features from earlier versions of Monkey island 1 that were mysteriously - and probably accidentally - changed the nowadays much more common CD version. Some of these features have been reintroduced by modifying the game scripts on the fly. (No, not the "stump joke". That was clearly a deliberate change. Maybe later.) Some obscure walk-related glitches have been fixed. The clumsily cracked version of Maniac Mansion sold on GOG and Steam should no longer accept (almost) any random phone numbers, safe combinations, etc.

And on the SCI side, the one-man army only known as "sluicebox" has been tirelessly hunting down and fixing every script bug known to man, as seen in this artist's rendition:

sluicebox.png (22.17 KiB) Viewed 16069 times

Of course, with all these new and exciting features comes the risk of new and exciting bugs. Testing a game is, alas, as time-consuming as ever. But it's great to see that the project is still going strong after all these years!

[MusicallyInspired]

Congrats to everyone involved in the hard work!

[Alien Grey]

Thanks to everyone involved for making this awesome ScummVM release possible.

It's nice to see support for the Space Quest 4 update 1.3 by New Rising Sun. There's no explanation how to get it to work but it looks like you don't need to patch the game to make it work. Just copying the patch files from the diff folder to the Space Quest 4 game folder seems to do the trick. It let me go to the room with all the stuff that got removed from the Space Quest games for legal reasons so I think it works fine like that.

I hope to see support for other patches (like the blue frog) if they aren't already so we can have a some sort of ultimate edition with ScummVM.

[Tempy111]

nice lot of support added, I keep forgetting how scummVm is more a 8/16bit emulator now, but I was playing I have no mouth the other day, this morning had this latest upgrade, installed that and now it won't play. "Could not find AdLib instrument definition files SAMPLE.AD and SAMPLE.OPL" tried another sound option but none seam to want to work..

[criezy]

nice lot of support added, I keep forgetting how scummVm is more a 8/16bit emulator now, but I was playing I have no mouth the other day, this morning had this latest upgrade, installed that and now it won't play. "Could not find AdLib instrument definition files SAMPLE.AD and SAMPLE.OPL" tried another sound option but none seam to want to work..

If you have the version from GOG or Steam, it is sadly missing those files.
See the important note at the bottom of the Installation section on https://wiki.scummvm.org/index.php?titl ... stallation.
You should be able to play the game by selecting a different Preferred Device in the Audio settings.

A fallback was also added a few days ago (https://github.com/scummvm/scummvm/commit/bc84221254) to use built-in instrument definitions instead. This results in less accurate music, but at least the game can be played with AdLib audio. This is also what older ScummVM versions where doing. So using a recent daily build should fix the issue.

But if you have the original version of the game, then it is recommended to get those files from your original CD so that you can enjoy the better music.

[Tempy111]

Okay.. dig out my CD and copied the sample files over, all fine now.

Any idea what changed though? why it was fine before the update, then after moaned and wanted them files? better support?

[Praetorian]

Any idea what changed though? why it was fine before the update, then after moaned and wanted them files? better support?

Yes, the engine was updated to make use of those SAMPLES files from the game's CD to more accurately play the music.
ScummVM developer NMIError explained it thus:

Well, those files are necessary for accurate OPL playback (...)
Btw, despite the name, the files do not actually contain samples.
They contain instrument definitions (what waveforms to use, how to combine them, volume envelope settings etc.)

The regular AdLib driver contains a standard set of GM-compatible instrument definitions.

[Tempy111]

Ah, didn't see that.. can't say I have really noticed but any improvement like that is worth it. Thanks ^_^

[sev]

nice lot of support added, I keep forgetting how scummVm is more a 8/16bit emulator now,

ScummVM is not a 8/16bit emulator, never been and couldn't be, even theoretically. No idea, what do you "keep forgetting".


Eugene

[Tempy111]

Sorry, badly worded, what i meant is it's not a Scumm Emulator/VM machine any more. It's added tons more engines to a point where even games which have no form of connection to the Scumm engine and it's uses are being supported. At one point it was for Graphical adventure and role-playin games but does more now even to Action-adventure games.

[Longcat]

Sorry, badly worded, what i meant is it's not a Scumm Emulator/VM machine any more. It's added tons more engines to a point where even games which have no form of connection to the Scumm engine and it's uses are being supported. At one point it was for Graphical adventure and role-playin games but does more now even to Action-adventure games.

It’s still badly worded. ScummVM has never been, and will never be, an emulator.

As for action-adventure games, these are usually only supported if they are made with the same engine as an already supported adventure game. In cold blood might be the exception, but I guess it depends on ones definition of action-adventure. It’s more of an adventure game with some action elements.

[Tempy111]

yeah.. I keep forgetting... Emulator not in the 'gaming' term but in the term of why it got the name... but yeah.. I need to work more on updating my terms and more careful with usage of language.. it's hard enough to understand when I'm trying to talk on some topics to someone that only knows USA English on non-technical details (how the hell is a pair of pilers wirecutters now ¬_¬) anyway..

one problem i guess is how game names have... greatly changed.. I still remember when a graphical adventure game was text based with pictures on each screen.. then it became to mean ones which were more graphical then text with graphical interface.. .. what are the old graphical adventure games called now? people still doing that whole stupid 'Interactive fiction' instead of text adventure?

[maioni]

Those files can be found into the DEMO version of I Have no Mouth, and I Must Scream

Demo: IHNMaIMS Demo.exe

Files: SAMPLE.AD and SAMPLE.OPL