By ending a wait that lasted almost two years, the developers of ScummVM announced the arrival of a new version for the virtual machine preferred by graphic adventure fans: also known as “Lost with Sherlock”, ScummVM 1.8.0 is hailed as one of the most hefty releases ever prepared by the team with the addition of many games and game engines, the substantial update of graphics and sound sub-systems and the availability of new conversions for minor platforms.

ScummVM 1.8.0 supports the following ten new games: Amazon: Guardians of Eden, Beavis and Butt-Head in Virtual Stupidity, Broken Sword 2.5: The Return of the Templars, Labyrinth of Time, Rex Nebular and the Cosmic Gender Bender, Sfinx, The Lost Files of Sherlock Holmes (The Case of the Rose Tattoo and The Case of the Serrated Scalpel), Zork: Grand Inquisitor and Zork Nemesis: The Forbidden Lands. Except for Broken Sword, a fan-made freeware title, all the games in the new release date back to the glorious age of graphic adventures from the Nineties and they use eight engines not seen before.

ScummVM 1.8.0 release notes don’t stop to new supported titles and includes an emulated Roland MT-32 MIDI synthesizer based on the latest version of Munt, the switch from AdLib sound to the Miles Audio framework for those games supporting it, a complete rewrite of Sierra’s Adventure Game Interpreter (AGI) engine which is now more compatible with the adventures from the defunct American company by offering dialogs, palette and font peculiar to Apple IIgs, Atari ST and Amiga versions and a proper handling of speed on Apple IIgs.

ScummVM’s sound, graphics and compatibility improved considerably in the new release, the developers say, while two new platforms (GCW-Zero and Raspberry Pi) join the already packed list of systems where it’s possible to download and run the VM. Besides the many changes brought to the source code compared to the previous release of 2014, the ScummVM project can now enjoy a new “home” on the Internet after having relocated from SourceForge.net to the new server donated by the German hosting company easyname.

A smaller change that almost no one likely noticed concerns the “welcome” text shown on the ScummVM homepage, which now features a call to financially help the project (through PayPal) for those unwilling or unable to take part by writing code.

Leggi questo post in italiano

Similar posts: