Dwatteau

Bonjour bonjour ! I've been using ScummVM for so long that I thought that I might as well contribute to it after all these years, even though I'm Not a Developer™.

I currently (2022) maintain the macOS 10.4/10.5 PowerPC release, which hopefully helps preserving big-endian compatibility of various engines (e.g. Dragons) for various other big-endian ports (such as PS3).

Lately, I've also written some of our SCUMM enhancements. As a side project, I also maintain Thomas Combeleran's ScummTR translation tools for various LucasArts adventure titles.

Here's a list of the various things I would like to improve in ScummVM. I make no promise and have no deadline, but of course if you're interested in something below, feel free to ping me. Maybe I can provide you more information or maybe we can work together on some points.

SCUMM enhancement ideas

Maniac Mansion

• If Bernard picks up the radio tube and puts it back in the radio, he will never be able to pick it up again.
  • Not sure if I'm going to fix this, since Maniac Mansion intentionally had some unfair actions on purpose.
• In at least V2 EN and the NES releases, script 7-59 is missing a byte in one of the last opcodes (printEgo("It's already full") is missing its first D8 opcode byte, and so the sequence is interpreted as an invalid `faceActor()`). I'm not sure there's any point of fixing this, though, because I can't find a way of triggering this part of the script.
• See if there's a way of restoring some of the censored content from the NES release, especially if the original resources are still embedded somewhere (I doubt that is the case, though).

Zak McKracken

• At Lou's Loans, if one uses the blue crystal on the lotto sign and gets caught by the Caponian, the Buy/Sell verbs are not properly deactivated, and so they glitch when Zak is put in the Mindbender.
• In Zak's kitchen, if one opens the pipe and let the water flow, the water animation will just freeze when Zak checks the room before leaving his flat.
  • This looks a bit naive, especially in the less limited V3 release, but naive animations are not uncommon in this game, and they may be part of its charm?
• Restore some missing V2 features in the v3 FM-TOWNS release:
  • Selling the Sell window to Lou
  • Let Zak sleep in his bed (the animation is still there in the resources)
  • Original V1/V2 intro order (as some say that the new intro order of the FM-TOWNS release makes no sense).
• Fix missing CashCard cheat at Lou's (Trac#13400); speed-runners can just uncheck the enhancement option
• Fix the broom alien pixel leftovers after picking it from the bed.
  • The resources haven't been properly drawn, so I don't think that fixing this would be easy, especially since we don't want to embed full copyrighted resources.