ScummVM

Game preservation is happening whether the industry participates or not.

Projects like OpenClaw, ScummVM, which has preserved hundreds of classic adventure games, and the Internet Archive software preservation efforts are filling the gap left by commercial entities.

But they need support.

Not necessarily money, though that helps, but community involvement.

So, lots of background information about that here, and of course, if and when that does come about, I will be talking about that here on Rees Rambles.

Uh, next up for something completely and utterly different again, um, if you are a ScummVM fan...

Now ScummVM, VM, if you're not familiar with it, is a platform that originally started to allow us to enjoy the older, uh, Maniac Mansion games and the kind of spinoffs from those, uh, stuff like your old Monkey Island games, all these point and click, you know, Day- Day of the Tentacle point and click adventure games, um, on modern platforms, and essentially you can, uh, load it up with all of your original copies of the files from those games, and it will actually run them through this interpreter that adds lots of nice quality of life stuff and support for modern platforms.

It has since branched out, uh, well beyond, uh, stuff that used...

I mean, Scumm, ScummVM, um, Scumm stands for the Script Creation Utility for Maniac Mansion, which is where it started.

Um, but it's- [laughs] ScummVM has now branched out way beyond that.

Getting back to the point.

Um, and the latest offering is Dungeon Master, which I thought was very noteworthy because, of course, this was a huge game on the Atari ST.

But I never played the DOS version until...

I was out of college, I was living in nearby Virginia Beach, and I really got into the SCUMM engine emulator, which I think is called SCUMM VM.

And that was the first time that I played the PC version of Maniac Mansion.

And I was surprised at how much easier it controlled with a mouse than a joypad.