Difference between revisions of "ScummVM History"

I have always been interested into understanding how games work, and I got especially interested into the [[SCUMM]] game engine at one point. It was possible to browse the resources using some fan-made tools, be nobody had wrote a full interpreter for those games. During holidays, in 2001, I had a lot of time on my hand, so I decided to get going and try to write a [[SCUMM]] interpreter. The first step was understanding the scripts. I took a few days looking at the scripts found in [[Maniac Mansion|MM]] and [[Zak McKracken and the Alien Mindbenders|ZAK]] (I assumed it was the same engine) and understood a large bunch of opcodes. Then I got into coding a tiny interpreter, making use of documentations found on the web to unpack the background graphics. This interpreter got as far as playing [[Maniac Mansion|MM]] character selection screen and [[Zak McKracken and the Alien Mindbenders|ZAK]] intro, but without any sprite/animations. I started working on this issue, and I got into interested by a document describing the sprite format used in [[Monkey Island 2: LeChuck's Revenge|MI2]]. Using this file with a little guessing, I managed to view the sprites used in [[Maniac Mansion|MM]] and [[Zak McKracken and the Alien Mindbenders|ZAK]]. For some reasons, I decided to mail the documentation author, telling him about my project and (if I remember well) asking for a few clarifications (I think it was about the "layer" system). The author (Ludde) answered me quickly and told me that he was also working on a similar project. While my idea was to start with the earliest [[SCUMM]] version and had features as they were chronologically added to the original engine, Ludde was focused on [[Monkey Island 2: LeChuck's Revenge|MI2]]. I quickly realized that he was way ahead of me, as the first screenshots he showed me was a more or less working [[Monkey Island 2: LeChuck's Revenge|MI2]] (the actual screenshots were from Woodtick). I didn't had to think much before dropping my own project and joining Ludde's.