New year update for ScummVM
The ScummVM team have released a small new year present for gaming fans, in the form of version 2.5.1 – a bugfix release, codenamed Californium because of the element’s average atomic mass – with, as ever, Cameron Cawley maintaining the RISC OS port of the system.
There is a comprehensive list of changes to get from the release of version 2.5.0 to this one. Some are more general changes, and most of the rest improve compatibility with certain games, with the following highlighted by the ScummVM team in their main announcement:
- Scalers have been added in OpenGL mode.
- Several bugs have been fixed in the Lost Files of Sherlock Holmes.
- The sound for Sam & Max is now more accurate.
- Graphics on some Macintosh SCUMM game have been improved.
- More renderers have been implented for The Longest Journey.
- Many enhancements have been made to Little Big Adventure.
- The notable (“dreaded”) bug on the startup of World of Xeen has been fixed.
ScummVM is a ‘virtual machine’ developed to make it possible to play a range of classic games on modern platforms. These are typically point and click adventure games, where rather than type in a command to carry out the next move in response to a block of text shown on screen, the player moves the mouse pointer over something on screen and clicks – that something might be an object to be picked up or examined, for example, or a place on the screen the player character should move to (or through if it’s a door or path). Carrying out such an action will trigger the next action within the game.
A number of games developed by LucasArts used a system called Script Creation Utility for Maniac Mansion (SCUMM), and the original version of the virtual machine was designed to make those games in particular work, but it has evolved way beyond that and now supports much more besides.
