ScummVM 2.0 Release Testing Has Begun

[Boleskine]

http://scummvm.org/news/20171122/

Nov 22, 2017: ScummVM 2.0 Release Testing Has Begun

The day has finally arrived to wrap up the current ScummVM release cycle! ScummVM 2.0 is one of our biggest new releases to date and adds support for 23 games:

• Cranston Manor
• Full Pipe
• Gabriel Knight
• Gabriel Knight 2
• King's Quest VII
• King's Questions
• Leisure Suit Larry 6 (hi-res)
• Leisure Suit Larry 7
• Lighthouse
• Mixed-Up Mother Goose Deluxe
• Phantasmagoria
• Phantasmagoria 2
• Plumbers Don't Wear Ties
• Police Quest 4
• RAMA
• Riven: The Sequel to Myst
• Shivers
• Space Quest 6
• Starship Titanic
• The Dark Crystal
• Time Zone
• Torin's Passage
• Ulysses and the Golden Fleece

This release also includes significant new enhancements and bug fixes across many engines, so go ahead and play through an old classic you’ve been missing even if it’s not on this list!

Grab a daily build of ScummVM for testing, and make sure to follow our guidelines for release testing. Windows users, please use a Kirben daily build instead of a Buildbot daily build. Report any bugs you encounter to our bug tracker, and once you’ve finished a playthrough, fill out our test results form. You can track testing progress on the wiki as it happens.

Happy gaming!

 

[Unkillable Cat]

Space Quest 6, huh?

I wonder if that includes the unique content demo as well?

 

[rohand]

wow awesome port to play some of that I own otherwise in GOG

 

[Aeschylus]

Space Quest 6, huh?

I wonder if that includes the unique content demo as well?

It includes all of the SCI32 demos, and all the SCI32 games except for the Hoyle ones, SWAT, and QFG4.

 

[Unkillable Cat]

wow awesome port to play some of that I own otherwise in GOG

IIRC the goal of ScummVM is to create the most accurate running environment for each title. By comparison GOG just slaps a .conf file in DOSBox and hopes that it won't explode in your face.

 

[Aeschylus]

I think the goal is more to create a portable environment, so the games can be run on Linux, various consoles, phones, etc. The virtual machine engines ScummVM uses aren't necessarily more 'accurate' than DosBox, but they're generally more stable (and easier to use) since the engine maintainers can actually fix bugs from the original games via script patches in the engines, and don't have to rely on an emulated Dos environment.

 

[Sceptic]

I'm less interested in the DOS games, especially Sierra's, since they run fine in DOSBox and script issues have been fixed by patches, but emulating something like LSL7 is really great news. I got it running on Windows 7 a couple of years ago but it was a tedious process and there were several glitches and problems, and I'm sure these will only get worse with new iterations of Windows. And I can understand wanting to consolidate all adventure game emulation under a single VM regardless of native OS, something which DOSBox can obviously never be.

I'm curious if they're going to have Shivers 2 on there eventually, that was an interesting game and another one that's a bit iffy to run nowadays.

 

[SCO]

LSL7 runs on dosbox. There generally are few (or none?) Sierra SCI games that don't have a dos version thankfully. Some sierra games that don't naturally. The bug fixing thing is well observed however.

One thing that annoys me about scummvm thou, is how they organize the data files for their own convenience, not the original engine. So for example, if you want to play or store the same game on both scummvm format, and DOS, you either need to copy large data files and rename them or use some sort of trick, which in linux fortunately exists in the form of hardlinks (spoiler: this doesn't work on games which have multiple data cds, because dosbox can't mount those and change cds at the same time because they don't want to bother, in spite of the feature - mounting dirs as cds - existing for single non-redbook audio cds).

While it would be ideal for Dosbox to get off their ass as implement multiple 'dir as folder' mounts with cds change and redbook audio (a extension of cue/bin/flac to cue/folder/flac file support i'd suggest), scummvm parsing isos as 'original data' would also work to share data - in a less space efficient manner.

BTW, i suspect the only reason Dosbox doesn't support this is because they made 'mount' mount the 'folders as cd' and made 'imgmount' support the cue/bin/flac code, so they'd need to move code from one to another. And the only reason that mount can't mount multiple dirs as cd is that that feature was coded into imgmount instead.

 

[Astral Rag]

Starship Titanic

 

[Aeschylus]

I'm curious if they're going to have Shivers 2 on there eventually, that was an interesting game and another one that's a bit iffy to run nowadays.

Certainly possible, though Shivers 2 was from the post-SCI era when Sierra started making a new engine for each game, so I imagine it'd take a while as they'd have to implement everything from scratch.

 

[Boleskine]

ScummVM 2.0 is officially released.

 

[taxalot]

On Android too, so that's nice !

 

[Walty Warner]

Phantasmagoria 1/2 support makes my mouth water

 

[taxalot]

A shame it's still pointless compared to Dosbox.

 

[Astral Rag]

Aspect Ratio is still fucked on Android.

 

[Unkillable Cat]

A shame it's still pointless compared to Dosbox.

Some of this is "IIRC", but:

# ScummVM is older than DosBox.

# Dosbox tries to emulate a generic DOS environment, that is its focus.

# ScummVM tries to bring the exact required runtime environment to each game, meaning they run as closely as possible to how they were meant to be played.

# With Dosbox you will have to fiddle with settings to get the game running right in Dosbox, on top of trying to get Dosbox itself running properly on your system.

# With ScummVM you only have to worry about getting the emulator to run properly, the game itself should run perfectly within the emulator.

# ScummVM supports a few non-PC games that Dosbox cannot emulate.

Conclusion: ScummVM should be the first-stop for emulating the games it supports. For everything else there's Dosbox.

 

[Anomander Rake]

Hey, got a question: why is dosbox being used instead of ScummVm for gog games?

 

[Unkillable Cat]

Not sure, but looking over the history of ScummVM there are cases where they have issued (and been issued) Cease & Desist letters over licensing in regards to certain titles and how ScummVM has been used by others.

But the most probable reason is that as ScummVM reverse-engineers game engines to get the games working, there's a legal minefield in there just waiting for the inevitable tap-dancers to come waltzing in. Dosbox however reverse-enginners an operating system which simplifies the legal wranglings considerably and also adds some degree of plausible deniability.

 

[Anomander Rake]

okay, thanks. In america people are really ready to sue for everything. >.<

 

[Barbarian]

I wonder why Quest for Glory 4 is still not supported. By now it is the only Sierra classic not playable in scummvm. Shame.

 

[jfrisby]

I find ScummVM feels vaguely clunkier in a lot of titles, I'm always hitting crtl-f12 to try to up the cycles. Nice to have the weird Win9x games supported, though.

There's a newish DosBox branch with 'perfect pixel' scaling and other updates built-in:
http://blog.yesterplay80.net/dosbox-ece-en/

 

[Unkillable Cat]

I wonder why Quest for Glory 4 is still not supported. By now it is the only Sierra classic not playable in scummvm. Shame.

Because Quest For Glory 4 is a bug-riddled mess. Creating a virtual runtime environment where QFG4 runs perfectly would violate some of the basic fundamental principles of the space-time continuum and allow the Many-Angled Ones passage to our world and usher in an unending age of cancerous Life.

 

[Sceptic]

There's a newish DosBox branch with 'perfect pixel' scaling and other updates built-in:
http://blog.yesterplay80.net/dosbox-ece-en/

Thanks for the link, this does look like a pretty good custom build. Glide emulation AND pixel perfect scaling AND MT-32 support? I'm sold. I used to rely exclusively on ykhwong's SVN build but he hasn't updated in a couple of years sadly.

 

[rohand]

wow awesome port to play some of that I own otherwise in GOG

IIRC the goal of ScummVM is to create the most accurate running environment for each title. By comparison GOG just slaps a .conf file in DOSBox and hopes that it won't explode in your face.

Yes I'm using it to play Phant right now