ScummVM 2.8.0: Mysteries, Mammoths, and Muppets

[sev]

We are proud to announce the last release of the year 2023. Please welcome ScummVM 2.8.0 – “Mysteries, Mammoths, and Muppets”.

New games
The team was quite busy working on new engines and enhancing existing ones. The list of supported games grew noticeably, and we now support these additions:

* Adibou 1
* The Dark Eye
* Dark Side
* Escape From Hell
* Gadget: Invention Travel and Adventure
* Gobliiins 5
* The Excavation of Hob's Barrow
* Kingdom: The Far Reaches
* Might and Magic Book One
* Muppet Treasure Island
* Nancy Drew: The Final Scene
* Nancy Drew: Message in a Haunted Mansion
* Nancy Drew: Secrets Can Kill
* Nancy Drew: Stay Tuned for Danger
* Nancy Drew: Treasure in the Royal Tower
* Primordia
* Reah: Face the Unknown
* Schizm: Mysterious Journey
* Shardlight
* Strangeland
* Syberia and Syberia II (macOS versions only)
* Technobabylon
* The Vampire Diaries
* Whispers of a Machine
* Wrath of the Gods and four other Director titles.
* 14 AGS titles by Stranga and Cloak and Dagger

All together, we’ve introduced 50 new games and five new engines.

New platforms
We are happy to see the RetroArch port being properly rewritten, and the port is now part of our source code. The Atari port has also been redone from scratch and now talks natively to the hardware, skipping SDL as an intermediate layer. That made many more games playable on the platform. The Atari FireBee port is still using the SDL library, though.

Speed-optimized graphics
Thanks to the work of one of the GSoC participants this year, Wyatt Radkiewicz (a.k.a. eklipsed), we now use CPU-specific SIMD instructions such as SSE, AVX2, and NEON for drawing graphics in the AGS engine and in some generic routines. This led to 4-14x speedup in drawing for many cases.

Networking games
This year, we merged with the Backyard Sports Online project, which made it possible to play Backyard Football, Backyard Baseball 2001 and Backyard Football 2002 over the internet with other humans. Also, the Moonbase Commander support is in active playtesting mode, though not yet ready for prime time.

Notable engine enhancements
The AGS engine has been brought up to version 3.6.0.53 from upstream.

For many engines, we added support for numerous Chinese and Japanese game variants.

Believe it or not, we implemented a lot of native GUI dialogs for SCUMM games, bringing them closer to the original experience. We also rewrote the sound code for the SCUMM Humongous Entertainment games, making them flawless.

We performed a deep review of the Broken Sword 1_ game engine, implementing some small, previously unnoticed things like scene transitions, in-game menu peculiarities, accurate fonts, idle animations, and more. Now, the game is absolutely faithful to the original.

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The full Release Notes contain a comprehensive summary of the changes and enhancements; it is about 3 pages long with this release.

On our downloads page, you can find the downloads for various platforms. If you are using Windows, macOS, or either the Ubuntu Snap or Flatpack packages, the autoupdater will assist you in updating to ScummVM 2.8.0. Android port will follow up very shortly, as we are currently in the Open Beta phase.

Play the games, and enjoy ScummVM!

Ah, one more thing…

ScummVM is coming to the Apple App Store for iPhones and iPads. Please leave us with good reviews and report any problems on our Discord server, which includes an iOS support channel.

[eriktorbjorn]

Believe it or not, we implemented a lot of native GUI dialogs for SCUMM games, bringing them closer to the original experience. We also rewrote the sound code for the SCUMM Humongous Entertainment games, making them flawless.

Unfortunately for those (most likely very few) who are planning on playing the 16 color Macintosh versions of Loom and Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, two bugs in the new Mac-style GUI weren't found until after 2.8.0 had been tagged:

• Using shortcut keys for the Macintosh menu commands results in screen corruption and sometimes crashes. Using the menus normally should be fine.
• In cases where Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade disables only one of the Save/Open menu items (which it will do on game over screens), it picks the wrong one. You can still use ScummVM's menu to load a savegame, though.

Work on this feature began quite late in the 2.8.0 development cycle (I'm not sure if that was good or bad timing), so this is not entirely unexpected that it still has some rough edges. Fixes are in place, both in the nightly builds, and in what will become ScummVM 2.8.1 in the likely event that there is one. And while there are still things in these games that aren't yet implemented or which don't work quite right, 2.8.0 should still be a noticeable improvement.

scummvm-indy3-ega-mac-00137.png (17.19 KiB) Viewed 12954 times

[nozomi]

Another amazing release!!! Thanks for all the effort. It's truly appreciated.

I've found that the Might and Magic engine does not seem to work. I attempted to add the newly supported Book 1 from GOG and could not, then found that none of the MM games work. I've tested this with the Windows, Mac Intel, Android and PSP builds...None seem to have the MM engine working.

[Praetorian]

Another amazing release!!! Thanks for all the effort. It's truly appreciated.

I've found that the Might and Magic engine does not seem to work. I attempted to add the newly supported Book 1 from GOG and could not, then found that none of the MM games work. I've tested this with the Windows, Mac Intel, Android and PSP builds...None seem to have the MM engine working.

You are right. It seems the Might and Magic engine was not set to be "built by default" so it was skipped in the release builds.

This is probably an oversight to be corrected in the next release.

[Nfsfan83]

Guys, Windows XP Pack 3 is not longer support? I download this: Windows Installer (32 and 64 bit) • 118.9 MiB .exe

and can't install on XP download zip and also can't run

[rootfather]

Guys, Windows XP Pack 3 is not longer support? I download this: Windows Installer (32 and 64 bit) • 118.9 MiB .exe

and can't install on XP download zip and also can't run

Support for Windows XP has been discontinued for now.

[DjDiabolik]

The main daily build for windows on "https://www.scummvm.org/downloads/" it's stop at 16-December-2023. Currently i have use that setup and use the master package from buildbot copyed in same path. It's ok ?

When the main daily build restart to build ?

*EDIT*
It's someone can advise some info about this dubs ? no ?

[nozomi]

Doing a little further testing and it appears that "Plumbers Don't Wear Ties" is broken in the 2.8.0 release as well as the current 2.9 daily release.
Testing with the Windows PC version of the game on Windows 64bit and Android 32bit causes ScummVM to crash/close. The 3DO release reports an "unsupported color format" error and does not load as well.

The Windows version does work in the official 2.7.1 relase.

[digitall]

nozomi: Plumbers should now be fixed for upcoming v2.8.1 release as well as the next daily build of v2.9.0 development master.