Windows CE

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ScummVM for Windows CE is a port of the mentioned interpreter for use with the Pocket PC and Windows Mobile platforms. It is currently actively maintained by Jubanka, following the footsteps of Arisme and Vasyl Tsvirkunov.

What is Windows CE

Windows CE is an Operating System developed by Microsoft, targeting mainly devices with minimal storage capacity. The latest stable version of Windows CE was released November 2006, with numerous new varations based off the CE core released later under both Pocket PC and Windows Mobile trademarks. The two latter are mostly intended for use in PDAs and smartphones specifically, ergo their respective titles. The Windows CE OS is identified by its version number; 2.00 being dubbed as Pocket PC 2000, 3.00 is Pocket PC 2002, 4.2x is Windows Mobile 2003 (SE), 5.00 is Windows Mobile 5 and so on.

You read more about Windows CE at Wikipedia, which new users are encouraged to do before using this port.

Supported Devices

There are two types of devices you can run the Windows CE ARM port of ScummVM with. One type being Pocket PC and features a touch sensitive screen, which is ideal to play point-and-click games on. The other type being Smartphone, which is often refered to as a mobile phone with enhanced capabilities that usually doesn't have a touch screen. While some smartphones do have touch screens, the majority don't and you will have to play the games by steering the crosshair using the phones buttons.

ScummVM currently supports all Windows CE versions from 3.00 (Pocket PC 2002) and up with the ARM architecture. This includes the vast majority of Windows Mobile devices out there, with the exception that they should have enough free RAM for both the executable binary and game data to run. Some Pocket PC 2000 (WinCE version 2.00) device are reported to work, although this has yet to be officially confirmed.

The codebase can support all types of CPUs and WinCE versions down to 2.00, but there's currently no official builds for e.g. devices using older ARM processors (Handheld PCs, Palm Size PCs) and others such as MIPS or SH architectures. If your device uses any of these architectures you will have to download an outdated build from the download page. And if you've got the programming know-hows, feel free to contribute with a more up to date build.

Supported resolutions

  • Low resolution Smartphones at 176x220
Support is only provided for games using a resolution at 320x200 or 320x240 as the font can get very hard to read. Should you have access to a talkie version of a game you would want to play, it would be to your avail to use that one. Games with 640x480 resolution such as The Curse Of Monkey Island or Broken Sword cannot be scaled down to this resolution without being rendered unplayable.
  • QVGA square devices at 240x240
Only games using a resolution at 320x200 or 320x240 are supported due to lack of downsampling scaler.
  • QVGA Pocket PCs or Smartphones, with resolutions at 240x320 portrait or 320x240 landscape
All games are playable in these devices. Some landscape devices may not be able to rotate the screen around.
  • VGA Pocket PCs utilizing a resolution at 640x480 or higher
All non VGA games should work properly on these devices. Devices with resolutions larger than VGA should be supported as the display can be resized with different scalers and have automatic screen centering. Also, VGA games will be displayed in true VGA mode.

Partial or discontinued support

Support for the following devices is not complete, not working properly or discontinued because the device is now obsolete. Feel free to contribute and improve the port for your favorite device, or use the last release built with the previous port architecture (0.5.1) which was less resource hungry and supported more exotic devices.

These devices will be supported through the GDI layer which will slow down the games a lot. You can try to disable the music/sound effects to get a better experience with a faster framerate.
These kind of devices have not been tested officially, feel free to run your own diagnostics and report with your success.

Supported games

All available ScummVM engines are supported in this Windows CE port. See the compatibility chart for more information on what games run on which engine. It should be noted that some games, such as Sam & Max: Hit The Road, may need to have a mouse button mapped to a physical button on your device. This can be accomplished by using the Mapping utility, please read How to use ScummVM below.

Free games for use with ScummVM

FAQ

  • How do I show/hide the toolbar (Pocket PC)?
Double tap at the top of the screen.
  • Is there a virtual keyboard around?
Yes, it can be accessed by double tapping near the top of the screen (Pocket PC) or by using the Keyboard action (Smartphones).
  • Hey, the game is stuck and I cannot quit without rebooting.
Bind and use the Quit action to cleanly exit ScummVM.
  • How do I do all those cool actions you talk about in the readme?
Bring up the Bind Keys dialog once you launch a game either by clicking the key icon in the toolbar (Pocket PC) or by pressing the associated key (Smartphones) and bind away actions to device keys of your choice.
  • What are the default key bindings?
Check out the port's readme (that is, the README-WinCE.txt file).
  • I cannot see the bottom part of the load/save dialog on Pocket PC because the toolbar is obscuring it.
Double tap at the top of the screen to hide the toolbar.
  • How do I get full screen display on VGA or larger screen devices?
Use a magnifying scaler (2x) from the game or global options menu. If your screen is larger than the resulting resolution, the ScummVM output will be centered in the display.
  • What are the pointer zones mentioned in the readme for Smartphones?
Playing with a simulated mouse cursor is awkward, especially when the cursor has to be moved constantly in different areas of the screen. One more or less common action in adventures is: a) Point to an object in the playfield, b) Point and click onto a verb at the bottom of the screen, c) Point and click to an object in the inventory at another part of the screen (f.ex. USE chewing gum WITH stick). The zoning function 'remembers' the position of 3 virtual cursors which you can toggle through with the zone action. Ideally, one of those should be positioned inside the playfield, another to the verb are and one more to the inventory area. Then, performing the previously mentioned routine should be easier: just press the zone action to warp the mouse to the next location.
  • Will ScummVM work for my device?
If it has an ARM based processor and it is a Windows CE or Windows Mobile device, chances are that the port will run fine. Note that several vendors (including Intel, Samsung etc) use ARM processor cores for main CPUs inside their System On Chip ICs which are used in Windows CE devices, so your $brand_name device may be ARM based.
  • Look, I have another question: ....
Always read the port's Readme file. Have a look at the generic ScummVM Readme file too. Then, come to the forums. :-)

Appendix A: Jubanka's "A Brief History of PocketScumm" :-)

Before me, there were two developers whose significant work has made ScummVM available for WinCE users. Eager to find out how the port got to the current form, I recently emailed Arisme asking for any bits of history he might remember. It turns out that Arisme has a weak memory :-) and a recent hard disk crash left him with less info than what he'd like to have. Nevertheless, his memory turned out to be unexpectedly good. So, let's go with some PocketScumm history, straight from the original porter:

« I remember that Vasyl did the first port, which was just working with no sound and no specific CE features (i.e. straight port from the CVS). Then Andys from PocketMatrix forums started working on the sound, and had some success with that, but without getting officially involved in the ScummVM project. If I remember well I got involved after sending some patches for Loom CD, and doing the "first refactoring" of the port which was basically C only at that time, I fixed some Pocket PC specific bugs, and started working on a specific UI for Pocket PC, the virtual keyboard and icons. Then a guy called Bjorn Eike Schwarz (Shapeshifter on PocketMatrix) improved the UI, virtual keyboard and icons. He passed away unfortunately :( so he deserves extra credits in the Wiki I think - see http://www.pocketmatrix.com/forums/viewtopic.php?t=20410

So that was early 2002 - during the next months I improved the compatibility on the different ports on Windows CE and my holy grail at that time was to have a single binary working with all screen resolutions, as well as a very easy code base to port on multiple other Pocket PC architectures (at that time MIPS and SH3 were still on the market), and a clean framework to port SDL based games on Windows Mobile. The Pocketmatrix forum community was quite useful at that time, with a lot of people always available to test the new releases (replaying full games on each release), and SirDave's excellent documentation project. I'd say my big achievement came with the 0.5.1 release in 2003 and the special scalers to work on the first Windows Mobile Smartphone (SPV E100). It was one of the early homebrew to work on the SPV as well (since I spent some time freeing the platform for developers also), and most probably the first single Windows CE executable to work on a Pocket PC and on a Smartphone :)

After that and other funny compatibility updates (due to the ever changing Microsoft platform and mostly "updates" to the graphics drivers), I decided to refactor everything since ScummVM was turning more and more into a C++ project and I felt a little bit left behind with my messy C hacks :) This happened in 2004 but I don't remember for which release it went public. The refactoring itself was fun but of course it broke many things and the result was significantly slower and less compatible than 0.5.1, which was a little bit disappointing. So I spent the next months trying to improve that, but eventually got super busy on other things and rather bored of that never ending bug fixing and attemtps to understand the next creative way Microsoft found to break the display drivers in the next devices (the giant mess that was Windows 2003 SE and its virtual VGA resolution along with the never kept promise of a standard DirectDraw layer coming to the mobile platform pretty much convinced me to stop developing games for this platform).

And that's where you came to save the day, I guess :)

To conclude I'd say that all these years were pretty much fun, I spent a lot of time on these games as a child and feel happy to have contributed to such a great project than ScummVM is today. I think this project makes a lost gaming genre still appealing for many people, and really preserves the history of computer gaming. Bringing my small contribution to this task and helping people carry their new favorite games with them was a great experience ... I think the best part of it were the posts or e-mails of people telling me that they won't get bored anymore on the train or on meetings :) »

Resources

External links

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