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Reporting unknown MD5 checksums

Revision as of 14:51, 14 November 2009 by Jvprat (talk | contribs) (Remove references to Igor)

This page contains instructions on what to do if you got a version of a game that the ScummVM team is not aware of (perhaps a rare version, or a less known one, or perhaps an unknown non-English version). In such cases, here's what you can do to get your version supported under ScummVM:

To get the MD5 sums:

  • The easiest way would be to check the ScummVM console window, which will report the unknown MD5s you got. If you can't see the console window, you can redirect ScummVM's output to a text file, by running ScummVM as follows:
scummvm > file.txt
  • If for some reason you can not see ScummVM's window or do not get any output in the text file, you need to follow an a bit harder process. The MD5-based detection in ScummVM uses the first bytes of each file to determine its MD5 checksum. This is necessary to speed up the detection process and to avoid having to calculate the MD5 checksums of large files, which would make game detection very slow.

Each engine in ScummVM uses a different number of bytes to calculate their MD5 checksums.

Number of bytes in each engine, to compute an MD5 hash:
AGI, AGOS, Cine, CruisE, Drascula, Gob, Parallaction, SAGA - 5000 bytes
Lure - 1024 bytes
Kyra, SCUMM - 1024 * 1024 bytes
Touche - 4096 bytes

Queen, Sky, Sword1, Sword2 use a different detection.


To get the correct MD5 checksum, run the following:

Under *nix:

 head -c size file | md5sum

Under Windows, download md5deep and run it like this:

 md5deep -p size file | find /i "offset 0-size"

Where size depends on the engine, as described above.


Alternatively, you can download the gnuwin32 coreutils and run the *nix command above. You will need head.exe, md5sum.exe and the two libraries from the dependency package.


After you get the MD5 sums of the game files, you can report them by using our bug tracker. It is much preferred over a post in the forums.