8 ms·
ScummVM “Interactive Fantasy” 2.2.0 Sees the Light
- LeoPanthera 6y agoSo the saying goes, the most-ported utilities of all time are Hello World, Kermit, InfoZip, and the Linux kernel. But surely ScummVM must be gunning for fifth place. The number of platforms with a build available on the Downloads page is genuinely impressive: https://www.scummvm.org/downloads/ https://www.scummvm.org/downloads/ As well as esoteric historic operating systems like AmigaOS and RISC OS, there are even builds for historical consoles like the Dreamcast. It's amazing.
- jonny_eh 6y agoRetroarch isn't far behind either: https://retroarch.com/?page=platforms https://retroarch.com/?page=platforms
- anthk 6y ago>But surely ScummVM must be gunning for fifth place. The number of platforms with a build available on the Downloads page is genuinely impressive: No. The Z-Machine itself in ScummVM has been ported even to pens and the TOPS-20 based KA-10.
- setpatchaddress 6y agoKermit still gets ports?
- m463 6y agoYou need kermit before you can get slip or ppp working.
- m463 6y ago+ gcc + doom
- csnover 6y agoIn my opinion, this is not actually a good thing. It creates an unhealthy focus on how many ports there are rather than putting the focus on the preservation of games and the quality of the user experience. Most of these esoteric ports can only be compiled by custom ancient GCC binaries whose original source code is either lost to time or won’t compile on a contemporary compiler or CPU, and nobody actually uses them. I ran analytics on web logs during the month after the ScummVM 2.0 release, and the Dreamcast port you mentioned accounted for 4[0] of 16,068 downloads. I would, furthermore, argue that this leads to less portable code in the long run since these old ports force the project to be stuck using C++98, so there’s a whole bunch of undefined behaviour, race conditions, and other garbage code in ScummVM which compromises future compatibility and wouldn’t be possible if unsafe coding practices from the bad old days were prohibited. Source: I was once a major contributor to ScummVM and tried unsuccessfully to fix this. [0] It’s a little hard to get an exact number since the port is split into several files; the most downloaded Dreamcast file had 16 downloads and the least downloaded 4, after excluding people who were just batch downloading the whole directory of installers. I use the lowest number since there’s no reason to think that someone would only intend to use engines starting with the letters A–G more than they would intend to use engines starting with the letters O–S, especially since the banner release in 2.0 was the SCI32 engine, and that was the one with 4 downloads.
- Enderboi 6y agoSnover! LTNS! Believe it or not, there's finally some progress here! https://wiki.scummvm.org/index.php?title=Compiling_ScummVM/C%2B%2B11_Readiness https://wiki.scummvm.org/index.php?title=Compiling_ScummVM/C... Even the Dreamcast port has a version of GCC able to pass the initial standards tests, so most legacy ports seem to be in a state that they'll be able to leverage at least a subset of C++11 functionality. (Sadly - as with many large community-driven projects that require a specialist set of skills like reverse engineering - ScummVM does have a slight history of alienating contributors only to adopt the point in contention as some point in the future. Source: I was once a co-lead developer for ScummVM, and tried unsuccessfully to fix this :P)
- csnover 6y ago
- hprotagonist 6y agoScummVM has been an enormously impressive piece of code for a very long time. Good job to the team, you fight like a cow.
- haasted 6y agoYou fight like a dairy farmer.
- Andrew_nenakhov 6y agoHow appropriate!
- makach 6y agoYou fight like a cow!
- rob74 6y agoAre you selling those fine leather jackets?
- unixhero 6y agoExcuse me, do you have a cousin named Sven?
- mhd 6y agoAsk me about loom.
- peignoir 6y agoGreat job to the team Indeed! Although I would say they fight like a hamster
- jedberg 6y agoYes!! I've been wanting to play Ultima 4 for a long time. But when MacOS stopped supporting 32 bit, the Dos VM I had broke. Now I can finally play it again!
- anthk 6y agoxu4 works on 64 bit. Also, DOSBox exists for OSX.
- kbenson 6y agoYeah, for anything DOS based, I imagine dosbox is a better solution. It's how gog.com provides those older games when you buy them, and they have to support them.
- madmoose 6y agogog.com provides many DOS-based games with ScummVM, when ScummVM supports them.
- kbenson 6y agoSorry, I actually knew that and forgot. I didn't actually mean to imply dosbox was better than ScummVM for DOS games, just that it's probably better than a full VM when it works. ScummVM is probably as good or even better than dosbox for the things it supports well, so would probably be better than a VM too.
- jedberg 6y agoI couldn't get DOSBox working on 64 bit with Ultima 4, sadly.
- anthk 6y agocompile xu4 with pkgsrc packages from Joyent. https://pkgsrc.joyent.com/install-on-osx/ https://pkgsrc.joyent.com/install-on-osx/
- m0ngr31 6y agoI think ScummVM runs on about every device I've owned in the past decade or so... Playing Quest for Glory on the Oculus Quest is pretty fun, but I think the PS Vita might have been my favorite ScummVM device.
- nicolas_t 6y agoThe switch has recently replaced the PS vita for me. Perfect for ScummVM...
- b3lvedere 6y agoI have played Monkey Island 1 on a twenty year old Navman N20 gps. It was a very fun excercise to get ScummVM working on that old Windows CE system and use its stylus to navigate Guybrush around. :)
- mysterydip 6y agoI had no idea ScummVM supported so many games and engines! I only knew it as the LucasArts games and what I assumed would be homebrew games using the same engine. If you were like me, check it out and play a really great variety of games!
- SamBam 6y agoHow do you find all the games (besides the 10 freeware I see under Games in the link)? Buying from Good Old Games etc?
- Scaevolus 6y agoMost of the games ScummVM supports are abandonware at this point, so there's no legal way to buy them apart from digging up used copies. Otherwise, as with most abandonware, they can be found floating around the internet.
- IceCreamJonsey 6y agoFor a lot of the text adventure systems that it now supports, this site will let you search by language - https://ifdb.tads.org/ https://ifdb.tads.org/
- unixhero 6y agoarchive.org -> software various abandonware websites, just google it
- egypturnash 6y agoHoly shit it now supports basically every text adventure ever: ADRIFT (except for version 5) AdvSys AGT Alan 2 & 3 Archetype (newly reimplemented for Glk from the original Pascal sources) Hugo JACL Level 9 Magnetic Scrolls Quest Scott Adams ZCode (all ZCode games except the Infocom graphical version 6 games). Currently, more than 1600 games are detected and supported. ---- The only notable text adventure interpreter I can think of offhand that's not on this list is The Quill. Testing it out though, I think it's got a few versions to go before it'll replace more focused interpreters - it won't load any zcode games distributed in the modern '.gblorb' format, and the decision to render all the text as white on searing blue, at 640x480, is... well, it sure is an accurate emulation of the experience of playing a text adventure back in the nineties, I'll give it that. Still, the breadth of support is super impressive!
- anthk 6y ago> - it won't load any zcode games distributed in the modern '.gblorb' format, That's Glulxe, not ZCode. It's the z-machine extended for 32 bit. >640x480, is... well, it sure is an accurate emulation of the experience of playing a text adventure Not so much, every interpreter in the 90's could change the colours perfectly. Also, the resolution didn't matter, as every game was tought for an 80x24 terminal. Frotz for DOS had color switches so you could use a b/w setup perfectly.
- egypturnash 6y agoI am mostly comparing the experience ScummVM offers for a text game to what something like Lectrote offers: a window sitting in your operating system, with text rendered at the native resolution of your screen by the OS's text system, versus a bunch of text routines spewing a 1-bit unantialiased font directly into an unresizable frame-buffer designed around upscaling graphical games of the nineties to modern screens. For instance, here is the first screenful of Plotkin's So Far in ScummVM 2.2.0 and Lectrote 1.3.4: https://egypt.urnash.com/media/blogs.dir/1/files/2020/09/So-Far.png https://egypt.urnash.com/media/blogs.dir/1/files/2020/09/So-...
- 6y ago
- scrame 6y agoWow. I had no idea ScummVM supported so many platforms. I thought it was just for old-school LucasArts games. Seeing "Eye of the Beholder -- Sega CD version" made me blink a couple times and says "huh, cool." out loud.
- Scapeghost 6y agoEverybody needs to try King's Quest, Maniac Mansion/Day of the Tentacle, Monkey Island 1/2, and Indiana Jones: Fate of Atlantis at least once in their lives. (I still can't beleive the levels of stupitidy this universe must have for Lucasfilm to not have made an Indy movie about Atlantis, instead of that crystal skull crap)
- neuralzen 6y agoYeah, that what exactly my thought when I found out they were doing the Crystal Skull instead of Fate of Atlantis. Talk about missed opportunities.
- HungSu 6y agoPerhaps because Harrison Ford was too old to possibly reprise a Fate of Atlantis Indy? Fate of Atlantis is set only three years after Raiders of the Lost Ark
- Scapeghost 6y agoI'm sure retconning (was the game even canon?) it as having happened after Crusade would have taken less work than writing an entire new story.. (though considering the quality of Skull's writing, I'm not sure)
- juangacovas 6y agoEven more, the ultimate geek will run those Sierra and Lucasarts games on ScummVM (or DOSBox) using Roland MT-32 emulation for enhanced music! (research on forums or Youtube). Pretty neat
- Scapeghost 6y agoOne of the best things about gaming in that era was how you essentially got multiple remixes/covers for every piece of music, depending on the hardware you ran it on. For some games, I prefer the Amiga music, for others PC/Roland, or even PC/Adlib if that was what I first grew up with.
- makach 6y agowow, that compiles nicely. That is very cross platform, can we make business apps with it?