SCUMMvm command line parameter help

[mystrw]

Hello,

I recently submitted an Issue Tracker ticket to help with the Director engine development effort regarding the game Opera Fatal and received the following response back :

"It is possible to start the game by giving scummvm the following commandline paramter: --start-movie="opera/intro/intro.dxr" operafatal)

Rather than taking up the developer's addit. time, I would like to ask here in the help forum how do I do/make the above change to how I start this game. I know the basics of how to use SCUMM to run games but don't know much about its technical aspects. Could someone please point me to info. regarding loading command line parameters to start in-development SCUMM games...? I checked the newbie guide (404 error), WIKI & FAQ but not sure if/where instructions might be in there.

Thank you for any help...

[eriktorbjorn]

Could someone please point me to info. regarding loading command line parameters to start in-development SCUMM games...? I checked the newbie guide (404 error), WIKI & FAQ but not sure if/where instructions might be in there.

Command line parameters refers to starting ScummVM from a command promp. Exactly how this looks and works depends on your operating system. Here's what one possible command prompt could look like in Linux:

command-prompt.png (19.93 KiB) Viewed 1843 times

Here I'm telling ScummVM to start Maniac Mansion (the game with game id "maniac-v1" in my scummvm.ini file) in demo mode, by using the --demo-mode command line parameter. (If I hadn't specified a game id, ScummVM would have started with the launcher dialog, but it seems that the demo mode option is lost then.) In this case, "./scummvm" means to start the "scummvm" program that's in the current directory. If it had been in a directory that was part of the default search path, "scummvm" would have been enough. The "$" is not part of what I typed, it's just a prompt to indicate that you can type something.

I would assume that you're running Windows. I'm sorry, but I can't provide any detailed instructions for that. But the general idea would be the same: Open a command prompt (there should be one in the start menu) and either go to the folder where ScummVM is installed or specify the path in the command you type. You should be able to find the game id by looking at your scummvm.ini file. The game ids are within brackets.

For some options, it's also possible to add them to the scummvm.ini file - you'll find several examples of that in your scummvm.ini file - but I don't know off-hand if that's possible for the --start-movie parameter.

[Praetorian]

I checked the newbie guide (404 error), WIKI & FAQ but not sure if/where instructions might be in there.

Hi there,
What is the newbie guide you've checked that returned a 404 error? If it's a ScummVM web page, it's probably best if we fix that.

However, in addition to what eriktorbjorn wrote above, the place to go for documentation on the command line parameters for ScummVM is at the online documentation for ScummVM and this page in particular:
https://docs.scummvm.org/en/latest/adva ... _line.html

[sev]

As I explained, that issue has been fixed, so you do not need to use that command line parameter, the game launches as is.

Still, you will not be able to even complete the intro because of the problems with video playback.


Eugene

[mystrw]

Ahh...thank you. I didn't realize to use the Windows command prompt. I was looking inside the SCUMMVM launcher fir a place to enter the command line. Understand now.

The link that gave me a 404 error is the 1st link in the SCUMMVM NEWBIE guide in the 1st post of this forum (link to guide made by clem)

And, yes sir, I tried loading the game again now using the launcher and see the original issue I reported has been fixed and that both methods of starting the game now give the same result. I just wanted to learn a little more about how SCUMMVM works and I've done that. Thank you all for your responses and help...