ScummVM 2.6.0 or: Insane Escapism

From the original news post:

Free your mind for yet another ScummVM release!

Eight newly supported games on 6 engines will plunge you into a variety of different settings. Are you able to escape from an alien-infested planet? What about challenging the Lord of the Dead in the Underworld? And have you ever explored the deepest depth of your psyche to see if you really know yourself?

Find out in one of the following titles:

• Sanitarium
• Hades Challenge
• Marvel Comics Spider-Man: The Sinister Six
• The 11th Hour
• Clandestiny
• Tender Loving Care (CD-ROM Editions)
• Uncle Henry’s Playhouse
• Wetlands
• Chewy: Esc from F5

Besides adding new games, we are always focused on improving already supported games. Once again, we managed to squash quite a few bugs from various engines. It is always impressive to see bugs getting fixed in engines that are more than 20 years old!

One of the main new features of ScummVM 2.6.0 is a completely new way to view your games in an amazing icon grid overview via our launcher. Accompanied by some very shiny artwork provided by our graphics artists, you are now able to show off your collection like never before. It almost looks and feels like a virtual shelf!

Check out the full Release Notes for a comprehensive summary of how our developers managed to make ScummVM even more amazing!

You can find all of this goodness available for a number of platforms on our downloads page. If you are using Windows, macOS or the Ubuntu Snap package, the autoupdater will assist you in updating to ScummVM 2.6.0.

As always, thank you for your continuous support — happy adventuring!

Nice work Cameron! :)

Sanitarium is a grotesque masterpiece. I’ve never tried ScummVM on RISC OS before so this is a good excuse to replay it.
Anyway I am having trouble with the menu. I think it is working but the buttons are blank and the mouse cursor is invisible so I can’t tell what I’m clicking on.

Could you post the contents of the stdout and stderr files in !Boot.Choices.ScummVM in case that has more information about what went wrong?

Also, it would be good to know what machine you’re running on and which version of RISC OS you’re using.

I’m running RISC OS 5.28 in rpcemu.

I don’t think I changed anything but I can’t get the menu to load at all now.

stderr
stdout is empty.

Edit: I deleted !Boot.Choices.ScummVM and I was able to load the blank menu again but stderr and stdout are both now empty.

Which options are you using in RPCEmu? You might need to increase the amount of RAM for ScummVM to work comfortably.

I have tried varying the RAM and hardware settings to no avail.

Do you think it might be a font issue? It seems to be just the text that is missing.

I just tried running ScummVM in RPCEmu, and it seems that this issue only occurs when emulating an ARM610 or ARM710 processor. It works fine when emulating a StrongARM processor.

You are right. I tried emulating the A610, A710 and then foolishly skipped over the StrongARM to the A7000, which also has the issue. Thank you for your persistence.

Hi! I did some work on Scummvm to add proper VSYNC, and now there’s an VSYNC option.

Does this Risc OS version honor the VSYNC option at last? It used to largely ignore it.

Unfortunately, the VSync code in ScummVM is only for SDL2 builds, while the RISC OS port still uses SDL 1.2 as SDL2 on RISC OS is still missing important features. I also can’t find any evidence that SDL1 or SDL2 have any way to control this when using software rendering – both of them only seem to support this with OpenGL or similar.

I can still investigate this, however I would appreciate some advice on how this should be implemented from a RISC OS perspective, and what kind of issues I should be looking for when VSync is disabled.

@Cameron Cawley

Yes, SDL1.x doesn’t have programmable vsync ON/OFF. But you could force it ON always, there’s no need to have tearing in games… I am sure the RiscOS code has a way to way for pageflips to happen? (ie: synchronous pageflips). That should be the default on SDL1.x, and in fact it used to be the default on GNU/Linux on the FBDev days.

Issues without vsync? Well, load Ween (DOS version) and watch the intro, which has an smooth scrolling sequence: shows horrible tearing on the Risc OS Scummvm port. Same with Monkey Island, but tearing is harder to see there (very evident to me, because I am used to correct those defects).

As for the Risc OS side of things, where’s the code for pageflip on SDL1.x for Risc OS?? There has to be a way to wait for pageflips to complete before issuing a new one. Every OS has that.

There has to be a way to wait for pageflips to complete before issuing a new one. Every OS has that.

If by pageflip you mean wait for the VSync so it’s safe to mess with screen memory, yeah, it’s the same thing since 1981. ;)

https://www.riscosopen.org/wiki/documentation/show/OS_Byte%2019

Better to have triple buffering on a Pi because [long complicated reasons to do with the fact that the primary processor on a Pi is actually the GPU and not the ARM]. But failing that, double buffering will be less icky than no buffering.

There’s also an event if you don’t want to just hang up waiting on VSync but would prefer to keep chundering along and responding to stuff, but this sort of thing assumes single tasking.
https://www.riscosopen.org/wiki/documentation/show/Event%204