ScummVM 2.8.0: Mysteries, Mammoths, and Muppets

From the original news post:

We are proud to announce the last release of the year 2023. Please welcome ScummVM 2.8.0 – “Mysteries, Mammoths, and Muppets”.

New games

The team was quite busy working on new engines and enhancing existing ones. The list of supported games grew noticeably, and we now support these additions:

• Adibou 1
• The Dark Eye
• Dark Side
• Escape From Hell
• Gadget: Invention Travel and Adventure
• Gobliiins 5
• The Excavation of Hob’s Barrow
• Kingdom: The Far Reaches
• Might and Magic Book One
• Muppet Treasure Island
• Nancy Drew: The Final Scene
• Nancy Drew: Message in a Haunted Mansion
• Nancy Drew: Secrets Can Kill
• Nancy Drew: Stay Tuned for Danger
• Nancy Drew: Treasure in the Royal Tower
• Primordia
• Reah: Face the Unknown
• Schizm: Mysterious Journey
• Shardlight
• Strangeland
• Syberia and Syberia II (macOS versions only)
• Technobabylon
• The Vampire Diaries
• Whispers of a Machine
• Wrath of the Gods and four other Director titles.
• 14 AGS titles by Stranga and Cloak and Dagger

All together, we’ve introduced 50 new games and five new engines.

New platforms

We are happy to see the RetroArch port being properly rewritten, and the port is now part of our source code. The Atari port has also been redone from scratch and now talks natively to the hardware, skipping SDL as an intermediate layer. That made many more games playable on the platform. The Atari FireBee port is still using the SDL library, though.

Speed-optimized graphics

Thanks to the work of one of the GSoC participants this year, Wyatt Radkiewicz (a.k.a. eklipsed), we now use CPU-specific SIMD instructions such as SSE, AVX2, and NEON for drawing graphics in the AGS engine and in some generic routines. This led to 4-14x speedup in drawing for many cases.

Networking games

This year, we merged with the Backyard Sports Online project, which made it possible to play Backyard Football, Backyard Baseball 2001 and Backyard Football 2002 over the internet with other humans. Also, the Moonbase Commander support is in active playtesting mode, though not yet ready for prime time.

Notable engine enhancements

The AGS engine has been brought up to version 3.6.0.53 from upstream.

For many engines, we added support for numerous Chinese and Japanese game variants.

Believe it or not, we implemented a lot of native GUI dialogs for SCUMM games, bringing them closer to the original experience. We also rewrote the sound code for the SCUMM Humongous Entertainment games, making them flawless.

We performed a deep review of the Broken Sword 1 game engine, implementing some small, previously unnoticed things like scene transitions, in-game menu peculiarities, accurate fonts, idle animations, and more. Now, the game is absolutely faithful to the original.

The full Release Notes contain a comprehensive summary of the changes and enhancements; it is about 3 pages long with this release.

On our downloads page, you can find the downloads for various platforms. If you are using Windows, macOS, or either the Ubuntu Snap or Flatpack packages, the autoupdater will assist you in updating to ScummVM 2.8.0. Android port will follow up very shortly, as we are currently in the Open Beta phase.

Play the games, and enjoy ScummVM!

Ah, one more thing…

ScummVM is coming to the Apple App Store for iPhones and iPads. Please leave us with good reviews and report any problems on our Discord server, which includes an iOS support channel

Nice! :)