Reporting unknown MD5 checksums

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.

From ScummVM

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.

Manually

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, Blade Runner, Cine, Composer, CruisE, Draci, Drascula, Dreamweb, Gob, M4, MADE, Mohawk, Parallaction, SAGA, SCI, TeenAgent, Tinsel - 5000 bytes (default)
Lure - 1024 bytes
Kyra, SCUMM - 1024 * 1024 bytes
Touche - 4096 bytes
Tucker - 512 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

Where file is the file to be examined and size depends on the engine, as described above.

Under macOS

 md5 -r file

Where file is the file to be examined.

Alternatively, you can install md5sum and run the *nix command above.

Under Windows

Download md5deep and run it like this:

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

Where file is the file to be examined and 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.

Submitting the MD5 Checksum

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.

Also to speedup things, please consider providing directory layout of your game.