ScummVM expands support for Macromedia Director

ScummVM is an awesome project bringing new life to absolutely loads of classic games through the power of open source, and now they're expanding support for Macromedia Director games too.

Currently it can open Director titles from 1995 and earlier, but titles released after 1995 use Director versions that aren't yet supported. The team mentioned there's about 1,595 of these games that ScummVM can detect from the original up to Director 11. With the 2.8.0 release adding in preliminary support for Director 5.

Adding support for a new Director version is a tricky process. First we need to check for any changes to the movie file format, then add in any new engine and Lingo features, and finally start working through issues in a bunch of candidate games. Because of the difficulty of keeping track of facts vs. assumptions, we only enable features for an engine version once they have been confirmed with testing. This is why D6 and higher games will not open at all, even if the code we have would somewhat work.

Support for the D2, D3 and D4 versions of Director has steadily improved. We are building up a suite of unit tests, both for Lingo and for the various drawing modes in the renderer. Most of the remaining bugs are related to undefined or incidental behavior: consider how two types in Lingo are compared, or the precise order that events are processed in, or how functions respond when you pass them nonsense data? All of these things are relied upon by thousands of Director products! And ScummVM must support all of them as closely as possible.

ScummVM Team

Planned to happen in the upcoming ScummVM 2.8.0 release they have these newly supported titles available for testing:

• Alice: An Interactive Museum
• Ape Odyssey
• Classical Cats
• Gadget: Invention, Travel and Adventure
• The Cute Machine
• The Dark Eye
• Wrath of the Gods

You do need to have a copy of the original games though.

See their announcement here.