Interesting. Thanks. 😎

Old news. We've been talking about it on IRC for the last few days. Get yer asses over there!

Is DOSBox involved? Or are the oldies ported?

Posted this on IRC:

1<D0SFreak> The classic adventure games don't use SCUMMVM or DosBox, instead they all have self-running executables for Windows.
2<D0SFreak> http://twitter.com/lucasartsgames
3<D0SFreak> hmmmm

Guess we'll find out wednesday. If this is the case hopefully you can rip the data files out and use ScummVM.

So someone else did a Windows SCUMM engine? Or does it just mean that they integrated ScummVM or DOSBox more tightly than usual?

It does seem like a waste of time if they didn't use ScummVM but wasn't there something awhile back between LucasArts and ScummVM? I guess they don't like it or something.

ah here we go:

http://www.scummvm.org/news/20020625/

Update: The text of the letter, and the teams response, can be found in the scummvm-devel list archives Today was a milestone fo […]
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Update: The text of the letter, and the teams response, can be found in the scummvm-devel list archives
Today was a milestone for the ScummVM project, as we finally received the long-awaited for e-mail from LucasArts Legal regarding the project.

Thankfully, they do not yet appear to have a valid complaint. Their message requesting the removal of the site is based on the presumption that we are distributing LucasArts own engine on this site. Of course, ScummVM is a fully original work based equally on reverse engineering and original decoding work by many different people in the community, so this request doesn't really affect us.

We're safe for the moment, and will continue to work on bringing the wonderful classics of the LucasArts company to your computing devices for, hopefully, a long time to come!

Guess they want full control of the code instead of someone else's.

Makes sense, lawyers always assume the worst - in this case, that the ScummVM authors would want royalties. Or maybe they'd just want to be able to make customizations to ScummVM without having to distribute the modifications. Oh well.

Edit: I wonder what they're going to do with the games that only have MT-32 and OPL2 soundtracks?

Well concerning MT-32/OPL2 my motto with any re-release (and life in general) is to assume the worst. That way your never disappointed and if the bare minumum has taken place your actually a bit suprised. 😉

Well the best they could do is probably to either re-arrange the music as General MIDI or else record the MT-32 music to MP3 (or whatever). The latter wouldn't be easy with SCUMM games though because they made a big deal about the music changing dynamically based on what is happening in the game.

I've bought and tried Indy3, Indy4 and LOOM. Indy3 and Indy4 are missing the files 00.lfl and atlantis.000 respectively so they can't be run through SCUMMVM nor through the DOS executables (which are still included). LOOM doesn't include a DOS executable (and probably also misses 000.LFL). Because of the missing files, SCUMMVM doesn't recognise them.

All the games come with a Steam-DRM wrapped executable that runs them in native Windows mode. According to the "About" box, it's based on an interpreter by Aaron Giles. (See Aaron's page on the interpreter )

LOOM appears to use CDDA (CD Digital Audio), but reduced to mono. I have sync problems with it just as I had with the original PC CD version. Especially bad if you alt-tab away from the game (even though it auto-pauses).

Indy4 plays the music through Windows MIDI mapper, probably the MT-32 soundtrack remapped to General MIDI which sounds odd on my real MT-32 but fine on GM compliant devices.

Indy3 appears to have an OPL emulator built in.

All the games have a scaler built in, which I personally don't like much, but it can be easily toggled via the window's system menu or by pressing Alt-S.

Googled for "Aaron Giles" SCUMM and found this: http://aarongiles.com/scumm/index.html

it's strange they didn't released it together with new movie, although that movie would not be a good advertisement 😉

That screenshot is a good example of why I don't care for most scalers. The way it tries to smooth the jagged pixel lines makes it look like a squiggle-vision cartoon instead of a low-res video game. My preference these days is simple bilinear filtering, since it replicates the soft glow of low-res CRT pixels in a way 😀