Technical information about SCUMM

[ebaudin]

Hello,

I am a "forever fan" of lucasfilm/lucasarts point and click games. I started with indy3, then zak, monkey island, the excellent indy4, etc. (IBM AT, then PSVP with 486)
As a hobbyist programmer I would like to understant how works the scumm data files.

To start, I have the Zak McKracken game (PC dos 16 colors enhanced version) that seems to be a SCUMM v2 game and may be a good start to "play" with.

I took a look at the https://wiki.scummvm.org/index.php?titl ... _Reference and others pages.

This page give a lot of information :
- the version of each scumm game
- the opcode table for each scumm version
- etc.

Hewever, it does not seem not to be "complete", for instance :
- the format of the index file for v1 and v2 ("Version 1 to 3 use hardcoded offsets and cannot be treated that easily")
- room ressources seems to be only detailed for v1
- image ressource are detailed from v6
- etc.

I guess all is naturally in the ScummVM source files (found in scummvm-2.8.1\engines\scumm), but it may be probably more difficult to extract the information from a standard doc file. Is there any others ressource or technical doc that details the scumm date file format ? I would like to be sure I have all accessible information before "diving in".

Thanks !

[sev]

I am not aware of other resources describing the SCUMM engine. And the Wiki was an import of another, now dead one, and I do not think there were many changes after the import.

Thus, indeed, the ScummVM sources are your best and the most reliable source: the Wiki could be inaccurate, but the code is proven to work. If you would like to improve the Wiki as a result of your research, that would be awesome!


Eugene

[ebaudin]

Thanks for this answer.
If I could extract easily information from the source code, I'll feed the wiki.

EB.