Written By : Ulukai
July 2004

Who can remember the time when MS-DOS was the operating system everyone had and every game had to be set up properly for your computer?

The hassles of making the game work properly by configuring your soundcard, video card and memory settings right.

This was before 3D graphics, this was the 2D era. The times a game would fit on a single floppy disk, now almost impossible due to the large amounts of data in modern games, and the fact that less time seems to be spent optimising the code used.

This was also the time that a lot of great adventure games were made. Games like the Monkey Island saga, the Leisure Suit Larry series, Day of the Tentacle, Indiana Jones, Simon the sorcerer, etc etc.

These games were point and click adventures, mostly made with cartoon-like graphics. You had to solve a mystery, a puzzle, reach a certain goal or rescue a person.

This was very often done with a lot of humour. To get to the main goal you often had to help others out, which in turn helped you out and lead to many funny events.

For people like me who have spent many hours on these games in the past, it’s nice to re-live all the funny adventures you had with them. Although playing them now with Windows can be a whole new adventure in itself

If the games run at all with Windows, the sound usually doesn’t work or doesn’t work properly.

You could use programs like VDMsound or DOSbox to get the sound running, but the game still might give you a headache with other problems.

Here’s where ScummVM comes in to play.

ScummVM is a 'virtual machine' for several classic graphical point-and-click adventure games.

It is designed to run: Adventure Soft's Simon the Sorcerer 1 and 2; Revolution's Beneath A Steel Sky, Broken Sword 1 and Broken Sword 2; Flight of the Amazon Queen; and games based on Lucas Arts' SCUMM (Script Creation Utility for Maniac Mansion) system.

SCUMM is used for many games, including Monkey Island, Day of the Tentacle, Sam and Max and more.

There’s no need for using MS-DOS with ScummVM, because it’s a Windows program and uses Windows’ drivers for sound and graphics.

Installing ScummVM and setting it up for a game is a breeze. Just browse to the right directory and ScummVM will do the rest.

All you need to adjust are the volume settings and optionally the graphics filter. The filter takes care of the nasty edges or pixels in the game graphics and makes it look a whole lot sharper, even at larger resolutions.

Within 5 minutes of installing, I was playing day of the tentacle demo and enjoying old glory. The graphics look amazing due to a nice filter and the sounds is crispy clear, no faults there.

ScummVM allows in game saving and has a fast forward button. The games themselves play the same way like you would play them originally.

What makes so nice is that it’s free and a nice bonus is that more and more old adventure games are also free now.

ScummVm also support a whole range of different operating systems, from Linux to PalmOS and everything in between. With this software you can renew the old adventures and still have a good time.

ScummVM continues to be developed and more and more games are added along the way. Daily builds are available for those that might encounter a bug.

On the website there are also additional tools to use with games to convert CD-music from the games to MP3 or Ogg file format.

Here’s the compatibility list taken from the ScummVM site, dated April 24 2004. There are quite a few classics on this list.

Game Compatibility Chart

Of course you can find all this on their website http://www.scummvm.org

They mention some free games as well.

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