ScummVM

ScummVM is a collection of game engine recreations. Originally designed to play LucasArts adventure games that use the SCUMM system (the VM in the name stands for virtual machine), it now also supports a variety of non-SCUMM games by companies like Revolution Software and Adventure Soft.

ScummVM is a reimplementation of the part of the software used to interpret the scripting languages such games used to describe the game world rather than emulating the hardware the games ran on; as such, ScummVM allows the games it supports to be played on platforms other than those for which they were originally released.

ScummVM was originally written by Ludvig Strigeus. Released under the terms of the GNU General Public License, ScummVM is free software.

Ports

Portability is a design goal of the project. Ports of ScummVM are available for Microsoft Windows, Mac OS X and a variety of Unix-like systems including Linux (RPM Based, Debian based, source based), members of the BSD family (FreeBSD/NetBSD/OpenBSD/DragonFly BSD) and Solaris. It has also been ported to console systems. Less mainstream personal computer ports include those to AmigaOS, Atari/FreeMiNT, BeOS/Haiku/ZETA, MorphOS and OS/2.

Official

A variety of game consoles have official ports; ScummVM has been ported to gaming machines such as the PlayStation 2, Dreamcast, Wii and GameCube, and to handheld consoles including the GP2X, Nintendo DS and the PlayStation Portable. Handheld computer platforms supported include Palm OS/Tapwave Zodiac, Symbian OS (UIQ platform, Nokia 60, 80 and Nokia 7710/90 phone series), Nokia's Internet Tablet OS (used by the Nokia 770, N800 and N810), Apple's iPhone and Windows Mobile.

Unofficial

Platforms supported by unofficial ScummVM ports include the Microsoft's Xbox gaming console, Zaurus and Gizmondo portable device platforms, the Motorola A780, and Motorola A680i. Linux-based mobile phones and GP32 are also supported.

Games supported by ScummVM

The following games have support built into the current release of ScummVM.

LucasArts SCUMM games

Sierra On-Line 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:

Development

ScummVM was a participant in the Google Summer of Code 2007 and is also a participant in 2008.

The following games have been added to ScummVM's Subversion tree. The engines may be in various states of operation.

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, the original developer of Another World, who was developing his own Windows-based update.

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

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.

TrollVM has also been integrated into ScummVM adding support for three pre-AGI games: Mickey's Space Adventure, Troll's Tale, and Winnie the Pooh and the Hundred Acre Wood.

Game releases

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 developers of Flight of the Amazon Queen made it freely available in much the same way.

The cut scenes from the supported Broken Sword games were encoded in the Smacker video format when originally released, which requires specialised software to be decoded. RAD Game Tools is unwilling to release the specifications of the older versions of the Smacker format and has asked the ScummVM team to not reverse engineer it. Revolution Software therefore allowed re-encoded versions of these cut scenes to be downloaded for free from the ScummVM website.