![]() ![]() “INSANE is a name well-earned,” he continues. Indeed, it was only four months later that Sandulenko would finish working on the INSANE engine that powers the Full Throttle bike fights. All I got was a pat on the shoulder and best wishes. Since I had several years of reverse engineering experience by then, I told them that I’d like to look into it. I jumped to the IRC channel again and got an explanation. “That meant the whole arcade bike fights section wasn’t implemented. Then, after playing for a little while, I got a message, ‘You can now jump the gorge’. “Apparently there was a problem with the fonts, which I fixed and submitted a patch for in the channel. I ran it and it crashed immediately,” he recalls. “It was October 2003, I purchased a Russian release of Full Throttle, came home to find a way of running it, and found ScummVM. The project soon saw other leads step in, like Eugene Sandulenko, who’s now been working on ScummVM for almost 20 years. Sure, one could always go back to a virtual machine, but it was a hassle compared to just being able to run the games on a modern OS.” ScummVM takes flight Those games were harder and harder to get working, and that was something I wanted to solve in some way. “Being open source, everyone can go in and see how those games are made and work, and learn from it. ![]() “There’s an educational aspect to ScummVM,” Hamm says. Once those LucasArts games were also being supported successfully, Hamm would gradually reduce his contributions on the project, though he still stayed in touch with the community he helped foster. I was still very much involved in the core of the SCUMM interpreter, continuing the work on later – Full Throttle, The Dig – and earlier – Indy 3 and Loom.” By then, though, the project had gained traction, with other people helping. He was still around in the chat, but contributed less. “This was also around the time that Ludvig, whose aim was just to emulate Day of the Tentacle and Monkey Island 2, started to lose interest. “The sound system in Sam & Max and a large bunch of script bits were very different from previous games,” says Hamm. They started working on supporting several LucasArts adventure games, but after finishing work on Monkey Island 2, they hit a wall. I got in touch and he was working on something similar, but was way ahead of me, so I dropped my own project and joined his – that was yet unnamed, as I recall.” When it came to adding characters, I found a doc online on Monkey Island 2 written by Ludvig. “So I started working my way through Maniac Mansion and Zak McKracken. “Other people had previously worked on the games, but nobody had taken a stab at the scripting language,” he says. Thinking back to when the project got started, co-developer Vincent Hamm remembers that he’d been poking around SCUMM-based tools for a while. This allows new features to be added, such as cross-platform support and graphical filters, and introducing new functionalities like save states or mouse functionality. Using the replaced ScummVM executable, all the game’s data files (graphics, audio, scripts, and so on) are still needed to play it. When this isn’t available, reverse engineering techniques are used to extract the code contained in the executable, thus rewriting it in C++. Instead, it’s based on rewriting a game’s original executable using its source code. Since its inception, ScummVM – its name derived from LucasArts’ Script Creation Utility for Maniac Mansion engine – was never meant to emulate any specific software or operating system. The original ScummVM project was started in 2001 by Vincent Hamm and Ludvig Strigeus – the latter becoming better-known as the main developer of Spotify. Around the turn of the millennium, though, a dedicated adventure game fan base began to overcome those hurdles, providing access to the output of LucasArts and beyond. With the Microsoft operating system abandoning the DOS architecture for good at the end of the nineties, playing old PC games started to become more and more of an issue. While such emulators as KGen and Snes9x allowed PC users to play Mega Drive and Super Nintendo games from the late 1990s onwards, there was no such luck on the MS-DOS or Windows front. Preservation wasn’t considered a pressing issue for the gaming industry until well into the 2000s. ![]()
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