[HN Gopher] ScummVM 2.5 "Twenty years ago today"
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ScummVM 2.5 "Twenty years ago today"
Author : galapago
Score : 168 points
Date : 2021-10-09 19:12 UTC (3 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.scummvm.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.scummvm.org)
| jfroma wrote:
| I remember spending a lot of hours playing Little Big Adventure
| with a friend. I love this, will try it out!
| hlandau wrote:
| ScummVM is an outstanding project. Originally an interpreter for
| the LucasArts SCUMM engine games, it has now seemingly become
| effectively a centralised home for assorted open source game
| engine reimplementations.
|
| I sometimes like to say that the Linux kernel is the world's
| largest collection of open source drivers, with a decent kernel
| attached; ScummVM is like that for old video game engines.
|
| Really, this is an incredibly valuable thing not just in
| practical terms for enabling people to play these games on
| different systems and with open source code, but as I see it this
| is a significant culture and heritage preservation effort too.
| Having these open source reimplementations ensures these games
| remain available to future generations.
|
| I also think it's pretty interesting to consider just how many of
| these engines had to be completely reverse engineered, and the
| time investment that implies. The effort to develop the engine in
| the first place probably took multiple people much effort when
| these games were first developed, and those programmers were
| paid; reverse engineering is harder and requires more effort and
| tenacity, and yet we still see a seeming overabundance of fully-
| functional complete reimplementations.
|
| One of the things I find fascinating about this is how the
| original programmers effectively cause the creation of the
| subsequent project, and their design decisions determine how
| successful that project is. The reimplementation project is like
| a weird "echo" through history, echoing off the original engine,
| caused by it yet done by wholly separate people, who are reduced
| to piecing through the original binaries like some act of
| software archeology, yet are motivated to do so by the merits of
| the original game. In other words, suppose you wrote a random
| engine for a company many decades ago, complete with assorted
| warts, retrospectively questionable design decisions, and kludges
| that were ultimately put in just to ship on time. It must be
| pretty weird to find, _decades later_ , that random hobbyists
| have rebuilt every piece of that architecture, painstakingly
| replicating every aspect of the original architecture,
| reproducing it as some verbatim gospel, even if it was something
| you barely put any thought into at the time.
| sho_hn wrote:
| I can only echo your enthusiasm and passion! I've been
| following and using ScummVM for nearly all of the two decades
| I've been involved in the open source community and it's been
| such a joy to see it grow and scale, and the quality of the
| conversations on IRC and in the forums. The territory it treads
| on is an amazing confluence of plain-neat hacking and the noble
| purpose of preserving these works for the future. What an
| outstanding pursuit in terms of what the engineering profession
| is all about - assembling the substrate culture and
| civilization transpire on.
|
| Cheers from the board of the KDE foundation. Incidentally we
| have a (25th) birthday coming up as well this month. :-)
| rolandog wrote:
| Beautifully said! I liked your observation about future
| enthusiasts poring over code; it reminded me about Thom
| Holwerda's "WTF's/m" [0] metric for good code and bad code. I
| try to keep that in mind when writing code with documentation
| so that I don't end up outsmarting myself writing cryptic one-
| liners.
|
| [0]: https://www.osnews.com/story/19266/wtfsm/
| flatiron wrote:
| > The effort to develop the engine in the first place probably
| took multiple people much effort when these games were first
| developed, and those programmers were paid; reverse engineering
| is harder and requires more effort and tenacity, and yet we
| still see a seeming overabundance of fully-functional complete
| reimplementations.
|
| The counter point to this is you are reimplementing the
| solution. The initial implementation was solving a problem.
| Which means it took a lot of tries before coming to the
| solution that you don't have to deal with when reverse
| engineering
| aasasd wrote:
| > _reproducing it as some verbatim gospel, even if it was
| something you barely put any thought into at the time_
|
| 'Bug compatibility':
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bug_compatibility
| nix23 wrote:
| >The Longest Journey
|
| Oh YES one of, if not the best adventure game ever!! (HD patches
| strongly advised)
|
| Thanks Residual and ScummVM Devs!!!
| deckarep wrote:
| Big shoutout to the ScummVM team for keeping these games alive
| and well on modern hardware.
|
| But did you know they also often times will additionally fix
| existing bugs in these games. Bugs that are now decades old!
|
| These classic titles are now even better to play than when they
| originally came out.
| winrid wrote:
| I was surprised to see Myst 3 in the supported games list. I
| suppose I shouldn't be though, it's a perfect game to be done
| mostly with scripting.
| max_likelihood wrote:
| Much respect to the ScummVM team as they allowed me to play the
| original "Secret of Monkey Island" after it left my local
| library! Ironically, I no longer needed the "Dial a Pirate" code-
| wheel.
| aasasd wrote:
| > _Crusader: No Remorse_
|
| Weird choice for ScummVM.
|
| Now, if somebody got a strong itch to remake the MacVenture
| engine, and I could get through the second Deja Vu without
| fumbling with half-baked mobile Mac emulators...
| skymt wrote:
| Crusader was built on the engine written for Ultima 8, which is
| supported as part of the ScummVM project's expansion into
| CRPGs.
|
| MacVenture support has been tinkered with over a couple of GSoC
| terms. It's not ready but there's interest and a foundation to
| build on: https://wiki.scummvm.org/index.php?title=MacVenture
| aresant wrote:
| There is a vibrant community releasing "new" classic adventure
| games in the spirit of the 80s and early 90s style - great
| resource to keep an eye out is https://adventuregamers.com/
| skymt wrote:
| Many of those modern-retro adventures are now playable in
| ScummVM thanks to the addition of AGS support.
| SLWW wrote:
| Why are they announcing support for Grim Fandango?
|
| I remember playing that on ScummVM years ago. Maybe I'm reading
| it wrong.
| skymt wrote:
| You may have played it on ResidualVM, a project that has now
| been merged into ScummVM.
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