ScummVM 2.7.0: The Real Slim Shader

From the original news post:

May I have your attention, please? May I have your attention, please?

We are proud to announce the first release of the year 2023. Please welcome ScummVM 2.7.0 – “The Real Slim Shader”.

New games

Once again, the number of available games increased substantially thanks to new engines, as well as incredible improvements across older engines.

With ScummVM 2.7.0, we officially announce support for the following games:

• Soldier Boyz
• Obsidian
• Pink Panther: Passport to Peril
• Pink Panther: Hokus Pokus Pink
• Adibou 2 “Environment”, “Read/Count 4 & 5” and “Read/Count 6 & 7”
• Driller/Space Station Oblivion
• Halls of the Dead: Faery Tale Adventure II
• Chop Suey, Eastern Mind, and 16 other Director 3 and Director 4 titles

Improved support for Broken Sword series

We vastly improved the detection method used for the Broken Sword series as well. Compared to the old detection method, this allows a much higher level of granularity, so we are now able to detect even the slightest differences between all the supported versions. We tried our very best to add all available game versions, but we need your help. If you notice that your version of Broken Sword 1 or 2 is not properly detected in ScummVM 2.7.0, please get in touch with us and report your version to our Bug Tracker!

New localizations

One of our goals is to support as many localized game versions as possible, so people can enjoy the games in their native language. This time, we added support for the Chinese, Japanese and Korean versions of many games, including Beneath a Steel Sky, Inherit the Earth and I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream.

New and revived platforms

Additionally, we proved ScummVM’s portability again by adding (or bringing back) support for numerous new platforms and devices:

• RetroMini RS90 (using OpenDingux)
• 1st generation Miyoo (New BittBoy, Pocket Go and PowKiddy Q90-V90-Q20) with TriForceX MiyooCFW
• Miyoo Mini
• KolibriOS
• 26-bit versions of RISC OS
• Nintendo 3DS

Of course, stable platforms deserve some love as well! We are very proud to announce that support for iOS and Android devices got vastly improved for 2.7.0! We don’t want to spoil everything that we have in mind for the future with these platforms, but stay tuned — it will be awesome.

Shader-based scalers

Ah, yes, the release codename. Glad you asked. The new release provides a way to run your games with visual accuracy like you’ve never seen before. Do you remember the warm glow of CRTs shining on your face? Get that experience back thanks to the introduction of shader-based scalers!

ScummVM 2.7.0 already ships with a curated set of shaders we carefully hand-picked from LibRetro’s shader collection. A more comprehensive set is available as an additional download from within the application itself.

Pre-defined random number seeds

Our speedrun community can now take advantage of a new feature that allows setting a predefined seed for ScummVM’s internal random number generator. Using a predefined seed now provides the ability to have reproducible runs over and over again. Pick a seed, set your route and you are good to go!

Check out the full Release Notes for a comprehensive summary of how our developers managed to create yet another amazing ScummVM release!

You can find all of this goodness available for a number of platforms on our downloads page. If you are using Windows, macOS, or either the Ubuntu Snap or Flatpack packages, the autoupdater will assist you in updating to ScummVM 2.7.0.

As always, thank you for your continued support and happy adventuring!

May I have your attention, please?

Uh, no. I have the attention span of a goldfish, so I need to put all my attention into a little box to dose out for those times when I need more than thirty seconds worth.

May I have your attention, please?

See? You had to repeat it for me. ;)

I like the idea of presetting the random number seed to ensure the same things happen each time.

Nice job Cameron! :)

Will download it ASAP and I think I’ll give it a test on FAST.

Seconded, well done Cameron and thanks for the continued support.

I have found one issue when testing the games I have loadedw with both the standard and vfp versions of 2.7.0, in that Broken Sword 2.5 terminates after the main loading screen whereas 2.6.0 does allow the game to load and work.

I have found one issue when testing the games I have loadedw with both the standard and vfp versions of 2.7.0, in that Broken Sword 2.5 terminates after the main loading screen whereas 2.6.0 does allow the game to load and work.

I looked into this, and it turned out to be the result of a change in how memory management is handled that was needed for supporting older versions of RISC OS. I’ve pushed a fix so that the previous method is used on RISC OS 5, which should be present in daily builds starting from tomorrow.

which should be present in daily builds starting from tomorrow.

Thanks Cameron! Started testing some games, so far all good and works nicely on RISCOSBits FAST, really enjoyable so far :)

I looked into this

Hi Cameron, thanks for the prompt fix and now downloaded and Broken Sword is no longer broken.

Take care

Doug