Month: January 2009

In the last years ScummVM became one of the most known open source projects. But it was not always like this.

Today eriktorbjorn stumbled upon the very first mention of ScummVM on Slashdot. What is amazing about this that some comments have links to screenshots posted, and one of them is still alive! I’m attaching the mentioned screenshot, as the server which hosts the original is quite slow. The screenshot is dated Sun, 04 Nov 2001 07:44:03 GMT which was “2nd pre-alpha release,” or 0.0.2. It was after 45 commits to public CVS!

Of course, it was not just the beginning of the development, as with his first commit Ludde submitted an already semi-working engine, still you may see this piece of our project history.

At the time ScummVM consisted of 13,658 SLOC (physical source lines of code) and was able to run 6 games, including monkey1, monkey2, indy4, indy4 demo, DOTT and Sam&Max. Compare it with today’s 663,214 SLOC, and I am not ready to tell how many games we do support :).

I think you’re aware of James Woodcock’s Music Enhancement Project. James was applying his talent to rearranging music for several titles supported by ScummVM.

One of his projects included complete soundtrack for Discworld.

During last several weeks he renewed his work on this project, and finally there are noticeable results. This is a huge step forward in the game atmosphere (though some may complain about not being faithful to origial), and I expect that many of our users will choose play this marvelous classic on new highs of audio experience.

James recorded a sneak peak preview of the soundtrack in action which you may see in the attached video.

The work performed is huge. It is over 100 minutes of music significantly rearranged and recorded on a modern Yamaha-branded sound equipment. It took almost 2 years for him to work over all 107 tracks. Besides, the work has been blessed by Terry himself, so this is going to be first sound pack officially supported by ScummVM and distributed from our site.

You will be able to play any version of the game with this new sound track, it will be just matter of extracting the archive into the game directory. Of course, original untouched MIDI music will be still present for those seeking true nostalgia (Who may also prefer to play fullscreen with 320×200 resolution:) ).

Stay tuned!

And now is the promised video:

(Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZsJ0iutFCvA)

As you perhaps know, for last 1.5 years ScummVM serves as an Ultimate AGI engine, especially since Kari Salminen aka Buddha^ joined us first as a GSoC member and then as a full-blown developer.

To the date ScummVM covered more AGI games than any other open AGI interpreter. The missings are AGI0, AGI1, AGI2.01 games as well as Tandy CoCo3 conversions.

Though there was a thing which bothered me for quite time, that is the fact that famous AGI Specifications is not fully converted on our Wiki. Important sections were missing, and not all existing text was in a good shape. So, finally I got some time and completed the project.

Now you may go and explore it on our Wiki. The big help for me was a wonderful online HTML to Wiki Converter – tables tool written by Borislav Manolov. I highly recommend it.