dog
@dog

I think I've mentioned this before, but I work on the ScummVM open source game engine project - specifically on the feature bringing support to old Director CD-ROM games. A lot of the weird and wonderful 90s games I love use Director, and I'm excited to make them easier to play. Today, we announced a new set of 18 games we're adding official support for, and the start of a public testing window using them: https://www.scummvm.org/news/20230124/

Now, you might say, "but Misty! That's such a weird list! Why didn't you pick something normal?" And to that I say, I'm sorry, I don't know how to play normal video games. If you put me in charge of a list of games, you get something that looks like this.

But beyond that: a bunch of these are genuinely really exciting, whether or not you've heard of them. I want to highlight some of the really cool stuff that's playable now. Here are just a few examples:

  • Chop Suey: Maybe the greatest "girl game" of all time, and one of the greatest games ever. Beautiful artwork, great music, wonderful storytelling. Please play this game.
  • Eastern Mind: The Lost Souls of Tong Nou - A masterpiece of surreal CG by artist Osamu Sato. This has been a cult classic on the web for a few years now, but it's incredibly hard to run on modern systems - or it was, until now!
  • iTA-Choco Systems games - Single-person indie altgames from the mid-90s. They're surreal simulations with totally unique art and sound. These games are very special - and also the only games on this list you can still buy today. The Windows versions available from a couple places work great in ScummVM.
  • Time Gal - Let me take you to the time warp! This rare Mac/Windows port of the Taito arcade FMV game is silly and a ton of fun.

Some of these are also discs I picked for technical reasons. I hope they're still interesting to players, but they're especially useful for us as things to test obscure or buggy Director features. Some examples:

  • Fukuoka Go-Round, a tourism disc for the Fukuoka region of Japan, required a total refactor of ScummVM's loading code because of how it handles one of its transitions. We want to make sure we don't break it again!
  • Japan Art Today #7, a retrospective on an early Takashi Murakami exhibit, uses a scrolling text box feature that ScummVM doesn't support yet.
  • The iTA-Choco Systems games use a series of unusual Director features that kept them from booting at all until recently. We really don't want to re-break them.

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in reply to @dog's post:

on the phone What? You're telling me Misty added support for the iTA-Choco Systems games and Time Gal to ScummVM? Misty??? Okay yeah that 100% tracks

(also congratulations on getting these added that's very exciting!)

aw yeah! More stuff for ScummVM is always good! Unfortunately my favorite obscure adventure game - The Day The World Broke - uses mTropolis, and support for that is pretty unlikely, especially since the best known game using it (King of Dragon Pass) used a ton of custom extensions to the point even the official remaster had to drop a couple features. And I tried poking around a bit but I just don't have the mindset for reverse engineering I think.

edit: WAIT NSVER MIND apparently someone was working on it for Obsidian, maybe there's hope :3

Yeah, Obsidian is the initial mTropolis target game - I haven’t done much in that engine, but I wouldn’t be surprised to see other games working once it’s running well.