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So the only legal way for you to acquire that 20 year old game is to wait another 70 years or more

No - resale is perfectly legal. And I can find it used for ~$38. However, I already have a large backlog of games to play. I'm waiting out to see if GoG gets rights to it and can release it. Even if the original artists don't get compensated this way, at least the rights-holder gets the message that this is a game people will still pay for (there is a nearly 7,000 strong wishlist vote on GoG now).

The Neverhood doesn't even run correctly on XP, since it requires 8-bit color and palette changes and is not very compatible. There are two ways to play it on modern systems - The Neverhood Restoration Project and ScummVM.

If they were actually porting games they would be spending a fortune and you would be getting 1-2 games per year. It's definitely a backwards compatibility emulation layer.

All emulators need validation. There are so many undocumented hacks and tricks developers use that there is no perfect emulator. So they need to test the game and release patches to ensure there aren't any game breaking quirks. That takes a little bit of time but it's not a "port" which would mean rewriting for the new platform. Load up any emulator's website like SCUMM and you'll see a list of games that work and games that have problems and games that flat out don't work.
http://www.scummvm.org/compati...

According to http://wiki.scummvm.org/index.... the best way to go about it is to pick an engine that ScummVM supports (SCI, AGI, or Wintermute 2D) and make a game for that engine.

There's links for each:

http://wiki.scummvm.org/index....
http://wiki.scummvm.org/index....
http://wiki.scummvm.org/index....

According to http://wiki.scummvm.org/index.... the best way to go about it is to pick an engine that ScummVM supports (SCI, AGI, or Wintermute 2D) and make a game for that engine.

There's links for each:

http://wiki.scummvm.org/index....
http://wiki.scummvm.org/index....
http://wiki.scummvm.org/index....

According to http://wiki.scummvm.org/index.... the best way to go about it is to pick an engine that ScummVM supports (SCI, AGI, or Wintermute 2D) and make a game for that engine.

There's links for each:

http://wiki.scummvm.org/index....
http://wiki.scummvm.org/index....
http://wiki.scummvm.org/index....

According to http://wiki.scummvm.org/index.... the best way to go about it is to pick an engine that ScummVM supports (SCI, AGI, or Wintermute 2D) and make a game for that engine.

There's links for each:

http://wiki.scummvm.org/index....
http://wiki.scummvm.org/index....
http://wiki.scummvm.org/index....

Does anyone know why Scumm adds so many brand new games to ScummVM? What is the point?

I suggest you have a look at the ScummVM download page and look at how many different platforms to which it has been ported. If you run Windows then there might not be any real advantage, but if, for example, you want to play a recent release on iOS, Android, Playstation 3, OS/2 or Amiga then this is just the thing for you.

What kind of rebel SCUMM would be responsible for that thought?

The only Lucas art museum I need is ScummVM.

Why not rip the games and give the kids a link to scummvm?

I do when I can. It's great, those guys are doing god's work and I implore anybody who could even foresee the use of it to kick them a couple bucks. But the fact is that it doesn't cover all the games I grew up playing like it only handles half the Dr. Brain series which that first game was fundamental in my understanding of logic and programming. And when I said LucasArts, I was mostly talking about X-Wing and Tie Fighter -- which I don't think used the SCI engine and I do not believe are available on scummvm. I think they can be run in a Win7 compatibility mode but I'm trying to sever Windows entirely from my dependencies.

It's more so a consumer protection and ethical question: how are we preserving that which we have valid licenses to? What is a company's responsibility (if any) to aid you in moving forward with those games?

Possible topics I'd be interested in considering are things like: should companies make an ethical move to include licensing terms that state they will open up source code they control if they go bankrupt? Should it be viewed as anti-ethical to shelve source code and let a product decay? To what level is that? I'd like to see a movement in the software world towards a future where we do not have "lost" ideas and art that were sacrificed to default greed at literally no benefit to their original owners/creators. It just feels wrong to think back on all the software I've used and realize that anything older than 6-ish years is very nearly completely gone. Games are the obvious example but I'm talking everything, even the stupid little versions of music players and instant messengers I used in college.

No one's asking these questions but here we are, hung up on the symptoms ... long live (literally) open source, I guess.

Why not rip the games and give the kids a link to scummvm?

I do when I can. It's great, those guys are doing god's work and I implore anybody who could even foresee the use of it to kick them a couple bucks. But the fact is that it doesn't cover all the games I grew up playing like it only handles half the Dr. Brain series which that first game was fundamental in my understanding of logic and programming. And when I said LucasArts, I was mostly talking about X-Wing and Tie Fighter -- which I don't think used the SCI engine and I do not believe are available on scummvm. I think they can be run in a Win7 compatibility mode but I'm trying to sever Windows entirely from my dependencies.

It's more so a consumer protection and ethical question: how are we preserving that which we have valid licenses to? What is a company's responsibility (if any) to aid you in moving forward with those games?

Possible topics I'd be interested in considering are things like: should companies make an ethical move to include licensing terms that state they will open up source code they control if they go bankrupt? Should it be viewed as anti-ethical to shelve source code and let a product decay? To what level is that? I'd like to see a movement in the software world towards a future where we do not have "lost" ideas and art that were sacrificed to default greed at literally no benefit to their original owners/creators. It just feels wrong to think back on all the software I've used and realize that anything older than 6-ish years is very nearly completely gone. Games are the obvious example but I'm talking everything, even the stupid little versions of music players and instant messengers I used in college.

No one's asking these questions but here we are, hung up on the symptoms ... long live (literally) open source, I guess.

SCUMMVM is available on Android, beeotches!

Have those games been updated to run on 10.8?

In general, the games never ran and never will run directly under any version of Mac OS X (or even "classic" Mac OS), and hence do not have to be updated. The currently released games fall into four categories:

• They are DOS/Windows games, but are supported by ScummVM. The GOG installer will install ScummVM to run them. Before you yell "those are not native Mac ports!", keep in mind that those games were originally basically a lot of sound, graphics and a script, bundled with a DOS-based script interpreter. ScummVM is a modern replacement for those script interpreters (it's also used on the Windows for most of those games).
• They are other DOS games. These are packaged so they run under DOSBox. These are obviously not native Mac ports either, but they're handled exactly the same by GOG on Windows. It's the same principle as using a Super Nintendo emulator to run old SNES games.
• They are Windows games. I'm only aware of The Witcher and King's Bounty being in this situation. The Witcher is based on Wine, I don't know about King's Bounty but I guess it's the same (but it may also be a native Mac port). In this case it's mostly a matter of not being able to play the games at all, or playing them under Wine. Your call.
• They are dual Mac/Windows releases. I'm only aware of The Witcher 2 being in this situation.

That said: ScummVM, DOSBox and Wine all work under 10.8. Since they are emulation layers to some extent, chances are actually higher that they will keep working with future Mac OS X releases (or at least can be fairly easily updated) than with so-called native ports. At least every boxed Mac game I ever bought is gathering dust (from Lemmings for System 7 to Deus Ex and No One Lives Forever for Mac OS X/PowerPC) (*) (**), while I can still play every single DOS/Windows game I ever bought thanks to DOSBox and Wine.

Since The Witcher 2 was only just released, I think it's a good bet that it will run under 10.8. Also, like the other person said, the Interplay promo does not include any of the Mac-ified games. All DOSBox-based ones are trivial to get running though, and the Windows ones generally aren't that hard either (I've been buying and playing gog.com games on my Mac for several years now).

(*) ok, one exception: Space Quest IV for Mac, which is supported by ScummVM...
(**) I know about Sheepshaver, but it wasn't been very stable when I tried it

A little known fact about ScummVM is that the official builds do not include all the engines that are currently in development. Makes sense of course that you'd only include engines and support for particular games once they're up to a sufficient level of quality, but there are in fact a number of engines (and hence games) which, although still in development, are mature enough to play all the way through if you use a nightly build from here:

http://buildbot.scummvm.org/builds.html

These builds contain all engines in whatever state they exist, and I like using them because unlike the official builds, these builds allow me to run Myst - Masterpiece Edition, Riven and Gabriel Knight 1 all the way through in each without too many issues (Myst's a bit unstable at times though, but it's random and a reload fixes things). The developers are quite fast at fixing issues though I have to say, so if you don't mind living on the edge you can play even more of the popular classics.

http://aminet.net/search?query=scummvm&sort=date&ord=DESC

The version on AmiNet is a little aged. While the site lists an official Amiga release for OS4, NovaCoder has been releasing for 68k Amigas and we should support his efforts. As well, there's a on official MorphOS port http://wiki.scummvm.org/index.php/MorphOS

Pretty neat stuff.

Or you can get the freeware version right from SCUMMVM.

http://www.scummvm.org/downloads/#extras

Surprised nobody here has mentioned Adventure Game Studio yet. It's free, runs on Windows. Ports are available for linux and mac. Some pretty great games have been made with it, including the excellent Sierra classic remakes by AGD Interactive. If you want something more old school, there is also ScummVM. It's mainly used to run old games by enthusiasts, but it can probably be used to develop new games as well.

PROTIP: SCUMMVM has done this for years, with a whole set of different filtering techniques: http://wiki.scummvm.org/index.php/User_Manual/Appendix:_Graphic_filters

Granted, they are not vectorizing. But they were big enough.

Iâ(TM)ve played Zak McKracken, Indiana Jones, DOTT, Monkey Island, and lots of others that way, and most of the time, the results were really nice.

There's a great variety of projects in there. Everything from serious academic theorem provers to even more serious things like helping people play Monkey Island

You could read into creating a game compatible with ScummVM.... it's open source and cross platform... and supports quite a few interpereters I suppose, given the games it already supports... it might be over or underkill depending on your needs though... http://www.scummvm.org/

You can even get it without signing up from the ScummVM project - completely legal.

Used to love the old Sierra adventure games. Now, it's the new Tales of Monkey Island -- the 5 episode thing from last year. Plays the same, but modern story and modern humour.

You might be interested to know that ScummVM now supports early-to-mid SCI games:

"We support Conquests of Camelot/the Longbow, Castle/Island of Dr. Brain, Codename: ICEMAN, EcoQuest 1&2, all four Hoyle games, Freddy Pharkas, Jones in the Fast Lane, King's Quest I-VI, both Laura Bow games, Larry up to 6 (low-res 6 only), Police Quest 1-3, Quest for Glory I-III, Space Quest up to V and a few others."

Links386, Master of Orion, Master of Magic, Battlecruiser 3000, Day of the Tentacle, etc.

Master of Orion and Master of Magic work perfectly in Dosbox. Day of the Tentacle (and other Lucasarts adventures) work better-than-original (due to nice graphics filters) in ScummVM. Dunno about the other two.

I wonder if one could remake MoM as a mod for the latest Civilization... Civ4 was pretty flexible, and Civ5 is supposed to be even more so.

(and don't talk to me about Cydia. It's even more of a mess, with a listing for every theme mixed in with anything resembling a useful app, and a godawful search that just makes it painful.)

yeah, this totally sucks. But for realz.... what has Ron Gilbert done for us lately.

I don't get the iOS bashing... I really don't. But I'm not a developer. I'm a little annoyed at Apple acting like they invented package management with the AppStore, it's silly... they stand on the shoulders of giants and take all the credit for themselves... but ... what major corporation doesn't? Apple has blazed trails... and because they're not every thing to every one... they get so much criticism. At least they don't announce things that don't exist.. Have an opinion, that's fantastic... but don't expect a minority to change a dictatorship. That's silly. Develop for Sony PSsomething. Develop for xbox, whatevs. So your BMW doesn't hav a flatbed, doesn't make a 10-wheeler? Why should anyone care? Apple has strived for the best for the most... not the anything for anyone. So what? They took a market that was ... absurdly mediocre... and raised the bar for everyone. Would Android even exist if it weren't for Apple? It's debatable. But the cell phone OS offerings prior to Apple's entry in the market were absurd... they were hello kitty keychains.Now, at least, they (the rest of the cell phone market) know that they suck. Don't like Apple for their products... fine... but thank them at least for making every other product better by forcing them to compete.

IMHO one of the best games in terms of artwork is Broken Sword 1. The scenes are handpainted and the character animations are very detailed. In the meantime ScummVM was developed which is a free software game engine which is able to play the data files of Broken Sword as well. ScummVM is not recommended for developing new games though. Maybe somebody nows a more modern engine with similar capabilities?

IMHO one of the best games in terms of artwork is Broken Sword 1. The scenes are handpainted and the character animations are very detailed. In the meantime ScummVM was developed which is a free software game engine which is able to play the data files of Broken Sword as well. ScummVM is not recommended for developing new games though. Maybe somebody nows a more modern engine with similar capabilities?

Try getting a good adventure game like the old Lucasarts point-and-click adventures

There are actually more new point-and-click adventure games released than you probably think. Their biggest difference from the 2D classics are that most of them are rendered with beautiful 3D graphics even though they often have a fixed camera position to emulate the 2D-adventure style of play.

Try browsing around at Adventuregamers or MobyGames for a while.

Some examples:

• Secret Files: Tunguska
• Secret Files 2: Puritas Cordis
• Tales of Monkey Island
• Sam'n'Max
• Syberia 1 & 2
• The Runaway series
• Ankh: Battle of the Gods
• ...and many more

Also don't forget that with ScummVM you can play LOTS of those classic 2D adventures that you never had a chance to play when you were younger. :)

For ScummVM, I already have the appropriate files for the MT-32 emulator.

While I understand that MT-32 has additional amazing capabilities, I'd have to ask:
How would a 0.5 MB (MT32_PCM.ROM) file compare with a 76MB (A340.SF2) file?

ScummVM's forum has a discussion on using SoundFonts.
http://forums.scummvm.org/viewtopic.php?t=5346

I've followed the recommendations and listened to Indiana FOA. The intro music alone sounds different. The fake trumpet and flute sounds edgier. The 'muted horns' feeling is not as pervasive. There are artifacts, but ... it just sounds different.

If you don't try, you'd never know what you've been missing.

The one recommended by ScummVM is Airfont 340 (A340.SF2).
http://forums.scummvm.org/viewtopic.php?t=5346

I've also tried others:
http://www.personalcopy.com/home.htm
http://www.schristiancollins.com/
http://www.pianosounds.com/freesoundfont.htm (piano only)
Heck, even Creative's 8MB patch.

I'm using A340.SF2 and TWSynth (TiMidity++ CVS081206) for now as my default Windows MIDI output.

Glad it works for you! And yes, SynthFont is meant for more than just playing, it can render to wave/mp3 etc.

I haven't tried it myself yet, but I just found this guide to using Timidity++ driver in Windows, which should allow you to use soundfonts with your normal midi player (e.g. Windows Media Player):

http://forums.scummvm.org/viewtopic.php?t=5346

Unfortunately nobody has yet come up with a simple free SoundFont compatible Windows midi driver.

Haha, upon further searching it looks like someone has done exactly that. This page explains it all: http://forums.scummvm.org/viewtopic.php?t=5346

When ScummVM gets ported to the Pre, then I'll get excited. ScummVM is usually the first gaming software that I install.

For Monkey Island and other supported games you should definitely try the Scumm Virtual Machine.

For Monkey Island and other supported games you should definitely try the Scumm Virtual Machine.

Note that for the Lucasfilms games like Monkey Island 1,2,3 The Dig and Full Throttle you can run using ScummVM. With this program you don't need the original executable anymore, only the data files.

The ScummVM emulator for running classic Lucasarts games like Maniac Mansion, Day of the Tentacle and the Monkey Island series also has a nice set of scalers and graphics filters.

The ScummVM emulator for running classic Lucasarts games like Maniac Mansion, Day of the Tentacle and the Monkey Island series also has a nice set of scalers and graphics filters.

Monkey Island suffers against more recent games because it had no voice (and http://speechproject.mixnmojo.com/ is far from complete). The voice acting in DotT is as good as the day it was released and running under http://www.scummvm.org/ with hq3x filtering gives you brilliant graphics that are true to your nostalgic memories. Now a sequel would be cool...

Just to let people know...GOG just bundles the original games with ScummVM and calls it a day. Not necessarily a problem since they have ScummVM approval, but if you're expecting some kind of port, you'll be disappointed. They caught me that way with Redneck Rampage. The web site says "Thanks to our handsome programming team, the classics are now Windows Vista and Windows XP compatible.", but they certainly didn't do any programming in that case. They just used DosBOX with a custom config file and that was it. I also got hooked by Sierra when they did the same thing with Kings' Quest and Space Quest collections. If you still own the games, you can just use ScummVM or DosBOX.

With that said, if you are looking for legal copies of these games, or aren't technically inclined, then GOG is a good way to get them.

http://www.scummvm.org/downloads/

You'll notice there is a Wii port available. As well as a DS, Gamecube and 30 more platforms. They made no rules about where it can be ported to, only Nintendo is setting rules about the use of open source (not just GPLed) code. It's their loss, but to blame the ScummVM license is ludicrous.

It's GPL 2 or later as per the
source
code
files.
It is also distributed with the
GPL2.1
and
LGPL2.1
license files, though I could not find any actual files in the source that use the LGPL.

The authoritative source for the version is the headers in the source code files.

Note that the
FAQ on their website
links to the
GPL 3
but this is not authoritative, what is in the source code header files is what counts.

It would simply make the distribution of said binaries illegal.

This is a important point, because
      1) the binaries are not illegal or a violation (only the distribution)
      2) the software source can be distributed, without a violation
      3) the game (without the VM built into it) can even be distributed to be run on the scummvm on the wii without any GPL implications.

since a legal version of scummVm is available (see link above) for the Wii, seams 2 issues remain:
    1) Nintendo won't allow the GPL statement attached to any games at retail.
    2) Atari doesn't want to release these games without the scummVM compiled into a single binary.

I would guess Atari needs the Nintendo approval, otherwise the DRM type capability wouldn't be in the game to prevent copying. And to get the Nintendo name on the retail boxes.

I don't see where the GPL requires them to provide the Nintendo SDK.

The ScummVM FAQ states that ScummVM is under the GNU General Public License and links to a copy of version 3 of this license on FSF's server. GPLv3 requires almost anyone who distributes a covered binary to provide source code and Installation Information. For a platform that enforces code signatures, like Wii, such Installation Information includes suitable signing keys.

The version being discussed is GPLv2, they where still GPL2till after 0.11 and AFAIK GPLv2 doesn't have any restrictions on signing (in fact i think that's one of the reasons that the linux kernel is still gpl2)

For what it's worth, eBay's another good way to go; I've done it several times now.

Also, I think you may be pleased when they add support for Discworld.

SCI-support not high on their "to do" list?

Pardon me, I present to you new evidence!

Well, you're partially in luck. ScummVM appears to work on the iPhone, and ScummVM supports Leisure Suit Larry according to their compatibility list.

ScummVM has moved beyond just LucasArts games and now supports old Sierra games. There's an iPhone port, so you should be golden for some leisure suit action.

...is playable on SCUMMVM

Sorry, but ScummVM doesn't "virtually include any single puzzle solving game developed from the beginning of times".
In fact a whole giant half of the gaming history is missing.

The two adventure games giants back in the days where Lucasfilm/LucasArt and Sierra.
ScummVM was designed from day to support Scumm system (the system used by all Lucas*).
But Sierra's engine aren't all there. The old AGI engine used in their first games has been worked in. But the SCI engine behind most of the classical adventure period of Sierra games is still missing.

Hopefully a merger with the FreeSCI project could one day happen and fix this big hole.