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ScummVM, Update With a Bang (kingofgng.com)
KingofGnG writes: The developers of ScummVM have announced a new version for the virtual machine preferred by graphic adventure fans: also known as "Lost with Sherlock," ScummVM 1.8.0 is hailed as one of the heftiest releases ever prepared by the team, with the addition of many games and game engines, the substantial update of graphics and sound sub-systems and the availability of new conversions for minor platforms.
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.
It's rather different from the kinds of adventures one usually thinks of for ScummVM, but some years ago a lot of work was done on the Mohawk engine, variations of which run Myst and Riven. Things stalled without it being promoted to testing, so it didn't get exposure and testing and attract new developers. But recently a lot of additional work has been done and it looks like this may finally see some light in the next release! See recent work here.
For Myst, one can choose between a number of rereleases, but not so for Riven, and the original and versions on Steam have some buggy behaviors on new operating systems. With a scummvm engine one could hope any issues would eventually be fixed, while Cyan doesn't have much incentive to fix their own old stuff.
(It really is too bad Cyan didn't do a 1440x1080 rerender / "HD remaster" of Riven. Yeah, it'd have to be 4/3 since they can't redo all their shots, but if they have the art assets it would be a big boon to have an edition with over 2x the vertical resolution.)