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.

Indy3

• The DOS VGA and the FM-TOWNS releases both have some 256-color porting oversights, as described in https://web.archive.org/web/20111015233333/http://home.comcast.net/~ervind/ij3misc.html and https://web.archive.org/web/20110926050144/http://home.comcast.net/~ervind/ij3fmtowns.html
  • Some of them are already fixed, some probably can't because the resources differ too much and we can't embed them, and others may be questionable (e.g. the butler, and the old man reading a newspaper).
• Apparently, some oversights from the English FM-TOWNS release were fixed in the Japanese FM-TOWNS release, such as the palette-shifting effect of the giant propeller, and the lightning storm at Castle Brunwald.
• Find an original censored German release and compare it with the regular releases.
  • The current workarounds would need to be double-checked there, and it may have some unique issues (such as with the encoding of some characters, or that bug with a giant Henry Senior in front of Castle Brunwald).
• Zeppelin fight bug reported on Discord on 2022-08-15: "in the zeppelin when you fight a german beneath a crossroad (well it isn't really a crossroad) you get ported to the higher level after the fight".
  • I can reproduce it on all versions I own, but I can't say if that's easy to fix.
• Irene does a "spontaneous appearance" if starting a new game, immediately going outside, skipping the cutscene, and then going to her office.
  • AFAICS, this happens in all releases, except for the Passport to Adventure demo.
  • Maybe related to Trac#6680 in some way?