Pertaining PowerPoint & SCUMMVM

mtonline · Post by **mtonline** » Mon May 06, 2013 10:43 pm

I posted this in a similar fashion on the Dreamcast section, but I see that this section gets more traffic, so I figured I would ask here. Is it possible to run PowerPoint point & click games via SCUMMVM?

Collector · Post by **Collector** » Tue May 07, 2013 2:00 am

http://www.scummvm.org/compatibility/

Post by **Strangerke** » Tue May 07, 2013 9:59 am

Thanks for your interest.

As mentioned Collector, we have a list of supported games you can look at. I have no idea what's behind 'powerpoint games': I find nothing relevant on mobygames, and the only thing I find on google concerns MS PowerPoint... Could you tell if you are mentioning games developed using PowerPoint (which doesn't fascinate us, I'm afraid) or some rare company (which at the opposite attracts me a lot)?

mtonline · Post by **mtonline** » Wed May 08, 2013 2:54 pm

I speak of games made by powerpoint. The homebrew Dreamcast community would explode with new point and click games like crazy if it is possible to run powerpoint through SCUMMVM.

DrMcCoy · Post by **DrMcCoy** » Fri May 10, 2013 2:28 pm

I for one still have no clue what exactly you're talking about.

Could you give us an example of which games you mean? Proper title and link to a review or Wikipedia article, preferably with screenshots?

In either case, ScummVM is not an emulator. We instead reverse-engineer the game binaries and, in effect, replace them. Adding support for a new game is a lot of work and can take months, even years. Therefore, people tend to work on games they care about.

Graxer · Post by **Graxer** » Fri May 10, 2013 6:51 pm

DrMcCoy wrote:I for one still have no clue what exactly you're talking about.

I think what they are referring to is things like this:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MKD4VCrwGmM

Therefore what I believe mtonline wants is a way for ScummVM to support interactive PowerPoint presentations so people can use PowerPoint to make their own games and run them on the Dreamcast using ScummVM.

Freddo · Post by **Freddo** » Fri May 10, 2013 9:19 pm

Seems to me a better choice would be to port LibreOffice to Dreamcast then. I assume it can play those interactive PowerPoint thingies.

DrMcCoy · Post by **DrMcCoy** » Sat May 11, 2013 12:24 am

Graxer wrote:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MKD4VCrwGmM

*speechless*

This...this abomination shows everything that's horribly wrong with PowerPoint.

envisaged0ne · Post by **envisaged0ne** » Sat May 11, 2013 4:59 am

DrMcCoy wrote:
Graxer wrote:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MKD4VCrwGmM
*speechless*

This...this abomination shows everything that's horribly wrong with PowerPoint.

LOL, I was thinking the same thing

Graxer · Post by **Graxer** » Sat May 11, 2013 7:52 am

Freddo wrote:Seems to me a better choice would be to port LibreOffice to Dreamcast then. I assume it can play those interactive PowerPoint thingies.

I'd agree with you, assuming LibreOffice does support the required features, that would be much more suited to playing these than ScummVM would. This doesn't really belong in ScummVM at all.

Duffadash · Post by **Duffadash** » Sat May 11, 2013 12:55 pm

This request reminds me of Zawinski's law of software envelopment (or software bloating if you will) which states that:

Every program attempts to expand until it can read mail. Those programs which cannot so expand are replaced by ones which can.

Adding word processing features into ScummVM seems like a great first step to having it read mail.

Seldon · Post by **Seldon** » Sat May 11, 2013 6:34 pm

I doubt any of developers would like to work on this, but in case that someone feels strange urge to do so... PLEASE DON'T.

topolinik · Post by **topolinik** » Tue May 14, 2013 2:57 pm

Duffadash wrote:This request reminds me of Zawinski's law of software envelopment (or software bloating if you will) which states that:
Every program attempts to expand until it can read mail. Those programs which cannot so expand are replaced by ones which can.
Adding word processing features into ScummVM seems like a great first step to having it read mail.

Once we get

games
word processing
email

just add facebook access and the next right step should be... scummvmOS !!!

mtonline · Post by **mtonline** » Wed May 15, 2013 12:53 am

wow... I was directed here by a Dreamcast community because they said to check here... didnt think it would be THIS full of trolls...

Post by **eriktorbjorn** » Wed May 15, 2013 3:17 am

Viewing PowerPoint presentations really strikes me as way, way outside of the scope of ScummVM. Kind of like adding a web browser so that we can play HTML and JavaScript games.

The specification for the old, binary PowerPoint file format is a 100+ page document, and it appears to be just an overview. It may say that ExMCIMovie is "a container to store data relating to an MCI movie", but as far as I can see it doesn't explain what an "MCI movie" is, or how to play one.

Then there's the newer OOXML format. What subset would we need to implement to handle games created in PowerPoint? I haven't the foggiest idea, and the specification is literally several thousand pages long. (Perhaps partly because it has to explain what things like "useWord97LineBreakRules" means.) And I don't even know if that includes Visual Basic for Applications, which I would assume to be a large part of at least some of these games.