Demos

Demos Project Service
URL(s)	https://scummvm.org/demos
Purpose	Provide a repository of demos for supported games.
Maintainer(s)	Eugene Sandulenko (Sev)

Introduction

Many game companies produced game demos that were freely distributed. The goal was to show a part of the game in order to encourage players to buy the full game.

When possible, we try to have demos of games runnable in ScummVM on our website. The purpose of this page is to describe how to package and upload them to our website.

Demo Criteria

Games

Demos should only be added for games made with engines currently in the ScummVM main codebase. Additionally, they must be demos for either:

• Commercial games
• Fan games notable enough to have a Wikipedia article (e.g. Space Quest: Vohaul Strikes Back), but not the full game

We unfortunately cannot accept demos for other types of games.

Versions

Sometimes different versions of demos were created for varying languages, platforms, or stages of development. There may also be differences such as "non-interactive" demos and playable "interactive" demos.

We try to collect all versions of a demo, especially when there are gameplay or other material differences between them.

Note that in some cases, demos are created with different engines than the final game. Byzantine: The Betrayal has a demo created in mTropolis, but the final game was created in Director.

How to prepare a demo for upload

First, check the demos page to make sure the demo hasn't already been submitted. (Demos for Director can be found here).

If this is a new demo, then do the follow:

1. Unpack the demo archive (e.g. ZIP file). If an installer needs to be run, do that.
2. Make sure that it loads properly in ScummVM
3. Re-package the archive as a ZIP file with all the necessary files so that a user can unzip it on any platform and have everything they need ready to go.
   1. On macOS/Linux, the recommended way to do this is to run zip -r9.

File Naming

After the demo is packed: name the file in the format of game-platform-(variant-)demo(2,3,etc)-language.zip:

• game: The game's shortname used internally by ScummVM.
• platform: The shortname of the original operating system the game was made for.
• variant: If the demo was special in any way. Examples might be:
  • ni for "non-interactive"
  • cga, ega, vga, etc if there were different graphics modes.
  • floppy, cd, etc if there were different format versions
• demo: The word demo, followed by a number if there was more than one type produced for the particular platform, variant, and language.
  • There is no pattern to the number other than the first one submitted is unnumbered, the second one submitted is 2, the third one submitted is 3, etc.
• language: The two letter ISO 639-1 language tt for the demo was released in (e.g. en for English, fr for French). If the demo is multilingual, omit this.
• .zip: The archive should be a zip file.

Examples

• A non-interactive French Amiga demo for Monkey Island 2: LeChuck's Revenge (shortname monkey2) would be monkey2-amiga-ni-demo-fr.zip.
• The second, multilingual Windows demo for The Longest Journey (shortname tlj) would be tlj-win-demo2.zip.

How to submit demos

Contact sev or another user who has access to our file server and provide the following:

• The demo file packaged as above
• A one-line description of the demo (e.g. Summer 1996 demo)
• Where you originally got the demo (e.g. PC Gamer disk)

They will process the demo and get it on the website.