SPEAKER_1: Hi, I'm Marius Gosch, co-project lead of Broken Sword 2.5, and I'm here with Scene World Podcast.
SPEAKER_2: Hey, it's the Scene World Podcast.
SPEAKER_2: That's Jörg over there.
SPEAKER_2: I'm AJ, and I'm sick, because I was around people on Thanksgiving.
SPEAKER_3: Best wishes.
SPEAKER_2: You know, during COVID, first we were locked down, and then we were wearing masks.
SPEAKER_2: Then even after we didn't have to wear masks anymore, I still had to wear masks for what I was doing for work.
SPEAKER_2: So I haven't been sick since 2019.
SPEAKER_3: Wow.
SPEAKER_2: And even if we did like a holiday thing back then, usually I was at work for it.
SPEAKER_2: I wasn't home.
SPEAKER_2: So I avoided it.
SPEAKER_2: But this year I couldn't avoid it any further, and got myself nice and ill.
SPEAKER_3: Sorry to hear.
SPEAKER_2: Yes.
SPEAKER_2: So in a minute, we're talking with Eugene Sandulenko from SrummVM.
SPEAKER_3: He is a project leader, actually.
SPEAKER_3: Yeah.
SPEAKER_2: In a minute, we'll learn more about that.
SPEAKER_2: In the meantime, there might be some news.
SPEAKER_3: Yeah.
SPEAKER_3: Oh, I definitely have some.
SPEAKER_3: So, number one news is December the 6th.
SPEAKER_3: By that time, you will read this or hear this.
SPEAKER_3: We are actually after December 6th, but Remute, aka Dennis Karimani, our PR person, will do a new music album for the Nintendo DS.
SPEAKER_1: Yeah.
SPEAKER_2: I wonder what the limitations of the DS are.
SPEAKER_3: I have no idea.
SPEAKER_3: Never owned one.
SPEAKER_2: Because I think the DS is a lot more advanced than like a Game Boy or anything like that, right?
SPEAKER_3: That's for sure.
SPEAKER_3: That's for sure, yes.
SPEAKER_3: Yes.
SPEAKER_3: And also, there is now an everything C64 Discord server.
SPEAKER_2: Oh, really?
SPEAKER_3: Yes.
SPEAKER_3: So I will put a link to that in the podcast description as well.
SPEAKER_2: Cool.
SPEAKER_3: And SrummVM actually put on their socials a shout out for testing the upcoming SrummVM 2.9.0, which also includes programs for 2.5 fixes.
SPEAKER_2: Okay.
SPEAKER_2: Nice.
SPEAKER_3: Yes.
SPEAKER_2: Yeah.
SPEAKER_2: They actually fixed a lot of stuff once we were, when we, well, you contacted them about some issues with that, right?
SPEAKER_3: Exactly.
SPEAKER_3: Yes.
SPEAKER_3: Yeah.
SPEAKER_2: Yeah.
SPEAKER_3: True.
SPEAKER_2: Nice.
SPEAKER_3: Other news.
SPEAKER_3: Interesting.
SPEAKER_3: Composer legend, Adam Gilmore, returns to making music on retro games for the Atari ST Oh, yeah.
SPEAKER_3: Now, Adam Gilmore, let's think about it.
SPEAKER_3: He did the music for the horrible European release of Afterburner on the Commodore 64, but at least the music was good.
SPEAKER_2: I don't know the music from the European version of Afterburner.
SPEAKER_2: I know the one in the US.
SPEAKER_3: Which was by Jérône Tell, yeah.
SPEAKER_2: What was it?
SPEAKER_3: Yes, it was.
SPEAKER_3: Jérône Tell, yeah.
SPEAKER_2: I know that there were some songs that got kind of like reused and reused and reused, like Top Gun.
SPEAKER_2: The music from Top Gun was Comic Bakery.
SPEAKER_3: Yeah.
SPEAKER_3: It was Jérône Tell because they fixed the playing routine to make his European music player play on NTSC speed correctly because he is Dutch.
SPEAKER_3: So he sent in the music to Activision.
SPEAKER_3: Not Activision.
SPEAKER_3: Oh, I think, no, I totally forgot.
SPEAKER_2: It always confused me because I would, I would, you know, I try to find the songs from these games that I played.
SPEAKER_2: And when I did find the music, it was not what I remembered.
SPEAKER_2: And then I hear the music somewhere else.
SPEAKER_2: And it's like, this is the Comic Bakery music.
SPEAKER_2: And it's like, I never played that game.
SPEAKER_2: It seems like a really, for what Comic Bakery was, it feels like a really bombastic piece of music for a game like that.
SPEAKER_3: I know.
SPEAKER_3: Anyway, I was wrong.
SPEAKER_3: Sega was copyright, obviously, because they released the Arcade of After Burner.
SPEAKER_3: But publisher was Mindscape.
SPEAKER_3: And musician, Jaron Tell.
SPEAKER_2: Okay.
SPEAKER_2: Well, there you go.
SPEAKER_3: Yeah.
SPEAKER_3: And now, Misc Relation, After Burner European version, Copyright Sega, Developer, Dallali Software, Musician, Adam Gilmore.
SPEAKER_2: So now he's returned to doing retro music.
SPEAKER_2: Did he do music for any other games?
SPEAKER_2: Anything else aside from that?
SPEAKER_3: Yeah.
SPEAKER_2: He did a lot.
SPEAKER_2: Was it all terrible?
SPEAKER_3: He did.
SPEAKER_3: I mean, at least the games were terrible.
SPEAKER_3: Yeah, he did.
SPEAKER_3: Very, very famous.
SPEAKER_3: C64 release was Elvira, the arcade game.
SPEAKER_2: Elvira, yeah, yeah, yeah.
SPEAKER_3: Elvira, okay.
SPEAKER_2: The arcade game?
SPEAKER_3: Yeah.
SPEAKER_2: I don't remember that.
SPEAKER_2: I remember, like, an RPG.
SPEAKER_3: No, it was actually an adventure, but they also made an arcade.
SPEAKER_3: They made two adventures, Elvira 1 and 2, and the third one called The Arcade Game, which is a jump and run.
SPEAKER_2: Okay.
SPEAKER_3: So, they made three games on the C64.
SPEAKER_3: Here are other famous titles he made music for was International Ninja Rapids, International Tennis, Ninja Commando, and Time Scanner, which is the pinball machine of Activision.
SPEAKER_2: Ninja Commando.
SPEAKER_2: Some of these things just seem like two words stuck together that don't necessarily belong.
SPEAKER_2: Ninja Commando, what was the rabbit, the bunny one?
SPEAKER_2: The rabbit?
SPEAKER_3: International Ninja Rapids.
SPEAKER_2: Oh, oh, no more ninjas.
SPEAKER_2: Okay, okay.
SPEAKER_3: And then he also did, then he also did Winter Olympiads, 88, and Winter Supersports, 92.
SPEAKER_2: But do you do Ninja Winter Supersports?
SPEAKER_3: Yeah.
SPEAKER_3: I mean, I guess he did the music where he was assigned to, you know?
SPEAKER_3: I guess as a musician, you don't really have the choice.
SPEAKER_3: You are contracted, basically.
SPEAKER_3: And he did the music for Blue Baron, which is a very famous shoot-em-up from Zeppelin Games, 92.
SPEAKER_2: And it's sequel, Blue Ninja Baron.
SPEAKER_3: Yeah.
SPEAKER_2: Lots of ninjas.
SPEAKER_2: Yeah.
SPEAKER_3: Yeah.
SPEAKER_3: And he did the music for Trolls.
SPEAKER_3: Just to name Trolls.
SPEAKER_3: Trolls.
SPEAKER_3: Yeah.
SPEAKER_2: I don't know.
SPEAKER_2: Was that a C64 game?
SPEAKER_3: Yes.
SPEAKER_3: From 93 by Flair Software.
SPEAKER_2: Oh, it's actually the Trolls.
SPEAKER_2: With the hair.
SPEAKER_3: Yeah.
SPEAKER_2: I did not know.
SPEAKER_3: Was also released on MS-DOS, Amiga, and Amiga CDs 32.
SPEAKER_2: That's pretty late in the game.
SPEAKER_3: I know.
SPEAKER_3: If you consider that from the original commercial market, the last game on the Commodore 64 was Lemmings.
SPEAKER_2: Right.
SPEAKER_2: Yeah.
SPEAKER_3: Yeah.
SPEAKER_3: If you go by Moby Games, Yeah.
SPEAKER_3: then, well, then you can see that he stopped making music in 2005.
SPEAKER_2: Okay.
SPEAKER_3: So, after nineteen years, he's doing game music again, and for the Atari ST, which is quite nice.
SPEAKER_2: Okay.
SPEAKER_2: Nice.
SPEAKER_3: So, he had a long break and he returned from the break.
SPEAKER_3: And he announced that on his Blue Sky social media profile.
SPEAKER_3: So, let's see what the games are.
SPEAKER_3: So, the games are Tony, Montezuma's Gold, and Time Wizard Deluxe.
SPEAKER_3: Both, Time Wizard Deluxe is an Atari 8-bit game, and the other one is an Atari ST game.
SPEAKER_3: Okay.
SPEAKER_3: Yeah, so somehow, they managed to hire him.
SPEAKER_3: And that's actually, he's only two posts on his Blue Sky social media profile.
SPEAKER_3: So he returned to the retro gaming music scene with a bang.
SPEAKER_2: Yeah.
SPEAKER_2: We may have talked about this before.
SPEAKER_3: No problem.
SPEAKER_2: Oh, God.
SPEAKER_2: Oh, that sucks.
SPEAKER_2: So, we may have talked about this before, but we've made the assertion that Lemmings is the last commercial game that was released from the 64.
SPEAKER_2: What's the...
SPEAKER_3: From the main market, the main original market, yeah.
SPEAKER_2: Because, I mean, there were commercial games, you know, especially, you know, again, we're talking about Lone Star that continued to release stuff long after that.
SPEAKER_2: And those were, I mean, those were commercial.
SPEAKER_2: You know, they made money.
SPEAKER_3: Yeah, but, but, but, but we are we are talking about the core market triple.
SPEAKER_3: I mean, back then, you didn't have to turn triple A titles, but at least still, still, Lemmings is considered the last game.
SPEAKER_3: Lone Star games weren't like big games that were made by big companies and stuff.
SPEAKER_2: I mean, some of them were pretty up there, were pretty really good games.
SPEAKER_2: But I mean, yeah, but it was still, I mean, you bought them.
SPEAKER_2: They weren't free.
SPEAKER_2: They were commercial.
SPEAKER_3: Right, right, right, right.
SPEAKER_3: But still, common knowledge is Lemmings was the last commercial game for the main market.
SPEAKER_3: And the game before was actually Mayhem and Monsterland.
SPEAKER_3: And there was a race between the two, which development team would release their game first.
SPEAKER_3: And well, Lemmings was the one that lost it.
SPEAKER_3: And it's also the last game, Jérôme Tell did music for in the Commodore 64.
SPEAKER_3: So that was actually his exit project for that platform.
SPEAKER_2: Right.
SPEAKER_2: You know.
SPEAKER_3: And we interviewed people before and they said, Psygnosis only released it because the game was already ready and the costs weren't high for publishing.
SPEAKER_3: So it was like, okay, now we have another platform on the list.
SPEAKER_3: So in 94, there was actually no real market anymore for lemmings.
SPEAKER_2: Right.
SPEAKER_2: Okay, interesting.
SPEAKER_3: And I remember many, many years after that, you could still buy copies, unopened, new old stock.
SPEAKER_2: Right.
SPEAKER_3: From some, from some online trade, trader stores.
SPEAKER_2: Yeah, I used to, I used to get a lot of my stuff.
SPEAKER_2: There was a little store in near where I used to live that sold new old stock, the C64 stuff.
SPEAKER_2: And I used to always get my, like I got to my gold, my gold box TSR games from there.
SPEAKER_3: Nice.
SPEAKER_2: They were brand new.
SPEAKER_2: So I picked them all up.
SPEAKER_2: They had like one set of each one.
SPEAKER_2: I also got my, I also got a couple of monitors from there and an actual C64.
SPEAKER_2: No, I got my 128D from there.
SPEAKER_2: My DCR, the big metal thing.
SPEAKER_3: Nice.
SPEAKER_2: They were going to call me if an Amiga ever came in, but they went out of business before they got an Amiga.
SPEAKER_3: Too bad.
SPEAKER_2: Yeah.
SPEAKER_2: I had to wait until like 2017 to get my Amiga.
SPEAKER_3: Wow.
SPEAKER_3: Yeah.
SPEAKER_3: Well, staying with the topic Commodore, Bill Winters released a new video, Commodore Stories and History with Commodore Software Products Manager Gail Wellington.
SPEAKER_2: Who did this?
SPEAKER_3: Bill Winters.
SPEAKER_2: Oh, yeah.
SPEAKER_3: Amiga Bill.
SPEAKER_2: Amiga Bill.
SPEAKER_2: Yeah.
SPEAKER_2: Good guy.
SPEAKER_2: We love him.
SPEAKER_2: Awesome.
SPEAKER_2: Hey, you watch the that reminded me because he did a a photo shoot thing or or or no, he was the cinematographer, camera, camera person.
SPEAKER_2: I don't know what I'm talking about.
SPEAKER_2: My brain is in the fog with Mike Tyson a few years back.
SPEAKER_2: Did you see the Tyson fight?
SPEAKER_3: I didn't.
SPEAKER_3: I didn't watch the but I do have Netflix.
SPEAKER_3: I can see the recording, I guess.
SPEAKER_3: But I heard Mike Tyson didn't move at all.
SPEAKER_2: So people are saying that it was thrown like he lost on purpose, that there was a contract.
SPEAKER_2: Some people are saying that Jake Paul is a really good fighter.
SPEAKER_2: All I remember watching was, what I remember from that is that Tyson barely landed a punch.
SPEAKER_2: He stood there.
SPEAKER_2: He moved pretty well for being as old as he is.
SPEAKER_2: You know, he's pushing 60.
SPEAKER_2: But Jake Paul landed more punches, but they didn't do anything.
SPEAKER_2: Like at the end of it, you know, Jake Paul was dripping with sweat, and Mike was completely dry, not a drop of sweat on him, just kind of hanging out like nothing, like he couldn't do anything to Mike Tyson.
SPEAKER_2: I feel like he was holding back, you know, because he really didn't throw much, and he spent a lot of time biting his gloves.
SPEAKER_2: So, but the fights before that were good.
SPEAKER_2: The women's fight right before him, holy God, that was good.
SPEAKER_2: Girl's eyebrow was hanging off her face.
SPEAKER_3: I'm not sure I want to see that.
SPEAKER_2: Oh, it was brutal.
SPEAKER_3: I'm not sure I want to see that.
SPEAKER_2: But yeah, it was a weird fight, and a lot of people are complaining, but it's like, it was on Netflix, you watched it for free.
SPEAKER_2: You know, it's not like you had to pay like a pay-per-view fee like you used to, you know.
SPEAKER_3: Ah, don't you have to need a subscription for that?
SPEAKER_2: Yes, yes.
SPEAKER_2: But aside from that, but I mean, everyone's got a freaking Netflix subscription at this point.
SPEAKER_2: So, you know, it's not like-
SPEAKER_3: Okay, in America, perhaps.
SPEAKER_2: You don't have to pay anything else.
SPEAKER_3: Not here in Germany.
SPEAKER_2: Yeah, you're not paying anything else for it.
SPEAKER_2: You just, you know, you go on and it's there.
SPEAKER_2: It's one of the core programming.
SPEAKER_2: Whereas boxing and wrestling and whatever else, they would always be like pay-per-view.
SPEAKER_2: You don't have to pay to watch the event.
SPEAKER_2: And in that case, I'd be, I might be annoyed if I dropped money on it, but it was free.
SPEAKER_2: You know, it was on Netflix.
SPEAKER_2: So I got it anyway.
SPEAKER_2: I could watch it and be disappointed.
SPEAKER_2: Though we did get to see Mike Tyson's butt, which was not something that was on my bingo card for the night.
SPEAKER_2: Oh, it was a weird, it was a weird part.
SPEAKER_2: His son was interviewing him.
SPEAKER_2: And it was, it was, you know, Tyson was just like, I'm going to, you know, kill the guy or whatever.
SPEAKER_2: But he's like, you know, I love you, kid.
SPEAKER_2: And he hugs his son and he walks away.
SPEAKER_2: And he's like wearing, like, no, he's wearing like an apron with no pants.
SPEAKER_2: He just walks away.
SPEAKER_2: So it's just like, like in this weird sequence of events of like, I'm going to kill him.
SPEAKER_2: I love you, but.
SPEAKER_3: Okay, weird.
SPEAKER_2: Yeah, yeah.
SPEAKER_2: It's a, it was an interesting event.
SPEAKER_3: I'm not going to watch.
SPEAKER_3: I don't want to see women having aprons hanging off her face.
SPEAKER_2: That was probably one of the best fights I've seen.
SPEAKER_3: If you are into that, into that things, okay.
SPEAKER_2: I'm not, I'm not, you know, it's, it's, I haven't, I watched box.
SPEAKER_2: The last boxing match I think I watched was, again, a Tyson fight and it was, I'm going to say 96.
SPEAKER_2: I was actually in Canada.
SPEAKER_2: I was in Toronto and, and we went to a sports bar to watch it and it was packed, like, like you couldn't get in.
SPEAKER_2: So my friends and I stood on the, on the sidewalk and watched through the window of the bar.
SPEAKER_2: So it was, that was the last time I watched a fight.
SPEAKER_2: Just because it was a big one.
SPEAKER_3: So what do you think?
SPEAKER_3: Do you think he held back?
SPEAKER_2: I think he did, yeah.
SPEAKER_2: I think he did, because that's the thing.
SPEAKER_2: It's like, you know, if he had, if he had gotten in one uppercut, it would have been done.
SPEAKER_2: Even to this day, you know, like he's older and he's not, he's not the mean dude he used to be.
SPEAKER_2: But if he really wanted to, I think he just, you know, he's making what?
SPEAKER_2: Like, like, like $20 million from this.
SPEAKER_2: I think he's just like, you know, I'll stand there, dance around a little bit and walk out with a giant check.
SPEAKER_2: You know, so.
SPEAKER_2: Better than going up against a real boxer because a real boxer might be able to do something, but this kid, he's just, you know, just everything bounced off him.
SPEAKER_3: Yeah, I heard he won the fight with Technica.
SPEAKER_2: Yeah, okay.
SPEAKER_2: Oh, yeah, on points.
SPEAKER_2: Not a KO.
SPEAKER_2: He just he landed more punches.
SPEAKER_2: Tyson only landed a handful of punches.
SPEAKER_2: He didn't even he was like I said, he wasn't throwing.
SPEAKER_3: Okay.
SPEAKER_3: Well, other news.
SPEAKER_2: We still got news.
SPEAKER_2: Okay.
SPEAKER_3: The Space Quest Historian released a video, Why Timers in Sierra Games are so Broken, which is quite interesting because it goes into depth why Sierra's adventure games have so much broken timer events.
SPEAKER_2: Right.
SPEAKER_3: Yeah.
SPEAKER_3: And also another video by the Space Quest Historian that he released, and I found very interesting.
SPEAKER_3: There is an emulator for the Sierra Games on the Game Boy Advanced, and that has been fixed after 20 years.
SPEAKER_2: Okay.
SPEAKER_3: Fixed in the way that now certain games actually work without crashing, and the music routine has been fixed before the music emulation was just broken.
SPEAKER_3: Right.
SPEAKER_3: Just wrong voices and stuff.
SPEAKER_2: Okay.
SPEAKER_1: Yeah.
SPEAKER_3: Okay.
SPEAKER_3: Yes.
SPEAKER_3: And also, the Bolo Museum announced the departure of Eve Bolo-Lockney, Bolo-Nini.
SPEAKER_3: Bolo-Nini.
SPEAKER_3: Yeah, exactly.
SPEAKER_3: So the Bolo Museum announced the departure of Eve Bolo-Nini from the Memoir Informatique Foundation.
SPEAKER_3: I don't know, I don't know French, because he wants to more concentrate on his artistic hobby, like juggling, circus and stuff.
SPEAKER_2: Really?
SPEAKER_3: Yes.
SPEAKER_2: I did not know he had that hobby.
SPEAKER_3: He does, yeah.
SPEAKER_2: So, so he left the Bolo Museum.
SPEAKER_3: Exactly.
SPEAKER_3: Yes.
SPEAKER_3: They had-
SPEAKER_2: To pursue juggling.
SPEAKER_3: Exactly.
SPEAKER_2: And the circus.
SPEAKER_3: Yes.
SPEAKER_3: Exactly.
SPEAKER_3: You got it.
SPEAKER_2: Okay.
SPEAKER_2: Well, you know, whatever, whatever floats your boat, man.
SPEAKER_2: I'm not going to, I'm not going to yuck your yum.
SPEAKER_3: Yeah.
SPEAKER_2: I wonder how much, what is juggle and pay?
SPEAKER_3: I mean, here we go.
SPEAKER_3: New artistic adventure.
SPEAKER_3: Since 2020, Eve has chosen to devote all his free time to his other passion, the performing arts, juggling, unicycles, acting and clowning.
SPEAKER_3: Eve is fully committed to his path, going so far as to become a coach at the Alchemy Circle School in Belcher.
SPEAKER_2: Okay, okay, okay.
SPEAKER_3: So he will actually be teaching the arts, all those different art forms that you use in the circus.
SPEAKER_3: So he will be like an educator in that profession?
SPEAKER_2: Yes.
SPEAKER_3: Yes.
SPEAKER_2: Yeah, okay, that makes more sense, then.
SPEAKER_2: I mean, in as much as clowns terrify me, if that's your passion and you can do something, if he's gonna go and be an educator, okay, I can see you making a living off of that.
SPEAKER_2: That makes more sense.
SPEAKER_2: If I was just like, you know, I wanna quit my job and juggle, I don't think many people are gonna pay me to do that, especially since I can't juggle.
SPEAKER_3: This reorientation motivates his decision to leave his responsibilities with the foundation while remaining close to the heart and spirit of the museum.
SPEAKER_3: The entire Bolo Museum extends its warmest thanks to him for the years of dedication, for his vision, for the passion he has been able to transmit.
SPEAKER_2: Okay, okay.
SPEAKER_2: So I guess he's not leaving it complete.
SPEAKER_2: He's still keeping in touch and all that.
SPEAKER_2: It's not like one of those guys that says, I'm leaving the scene completely.
SPEAKER_2: I have something else going on, so I'm never going to look at a C64 and get in my life.
SPEAKER_2: Which just doesn't make any sense.
SPEAKER_2: Like how hard is it to put an emulator on your computer and check out a demo or something or play some game?
SPEAKER_2: You know, like people are like, I'm moving on.
SPEAKER_2: I'm never looking at this again.
SPEAKER_2: I'm selling all my hardware and I'm going to, you know, raise porcupines or something.
SPEAKER_3: I don't know.
SPEAKER_3: I mean, it could be PR talk.
SPEAKER_3: I don't know.
SPEAKER_3: Well, it's hard to tell, actually.
SPEAKER_2: Yeah.
SPEAKER_3: Yeah.
SPEAKER_2: Well, I think that the, oh, God, I think that the the default would be, you know, again, if I left, if I was like, I don't have time to do this stuff anymore.
SPEAKER_2: Like which, which is sort of true.
SPEAKER_2: You know, I've done that plenty of times where it's like, I don't have time to be a full time coder or graphics guy or whatever.
SPEAKER_2: But I don't get rid of my stuff.
SPEAKER_2: I might pack it up for a bit because, you know, I don't have a useful, but I had always had like an emulator.
SPEAKER_2: I never really, I never lost touch with what was happening.
SPEAKER_2: I was still looking at things and keeping, keeping in touch with people.
SPEAKER_3: I mean, you, we have the, we have the, we have the, we have some examples.
SPEAKER_3: Silvio Zavarino, I've never heard of him ever since he said he quits.
SPEAKER_3: Right.
SPEAKER_3: Just one example.
SPEAKER_2: Yeah.
SPEAKER_2: Yeah, no, we've had a few people do that, where they're just like, I'm quitting, I'm done with this.
SPEAKER_2: It's just like, it seems like if this is your hobby, this is something you enjoy doing.
SPEAKER_2: Even if you're not a part of, like if I left Scene World for whatever reason, if I was like, I don't have time to do this shit anymore, and I left, I'd still keep an eye on the scene.
SPEAKER_2: I wouldn't like just walk away from all the stuff that I've been doing for 40 fricking years now.
SPEAKER_3: Which is a lot of people are doing, actually.
SPEAKER_2: Right, yeah.
SPEAKER_3: People are heartless.
SPEAKER_2: So, yeah, got anything else?
SPEAKER_3: Okay, yeah.
SPEAKER_3: Again, the Space Quest historian, he is really pushing out a lot of stuff lately.
SPEAKER_3: And here's the thing, he has a secret King's Quest stream VOD playlist of unlisted streams where he plays through all King's Quest games.
SPEAKER_2: Oh, okay.
SPEAKER_3: Now it's no longer a secret, because I will link it on the podcast description.
SPEAKER_2: Sweet.
SPEAKER_3: Yes.
SPEAKER_3: And one retro scene guy from Germany, Wirken Kling, he runs the company, the animation company, White Death Animation Films, and he has actually running a Kickstarter campaign now for a 15-minute short animated movie called Crappy Christmas.
SPEAKER_2: Okay.
SPEAKER_3: Yeah.
SPEAKER_2: Okay.
SPEAKER_3: Julatide Suicide.
SPEAKER_2: All right.
SPEAKER_3: And that's my news.
SPEAKER_2: Okay.
SPEAKER_2: Well, I got nothing.
SPEAKER_3: Okay.
SPEAKER_2: So that's all the news.
SPEAKER_3: Good.
SPEAKER_3: Now, let's head over to the Netherlands and speak to Eugene.
SPEAKER_2: Yep.
SPEAKER_2: And I'm going to lay down over there and slowly.
SPEAKER_3: Enjoy your, your cough.
SPEAKER_2: Yes.
SPEAKER_3: All righty.
SPEAKER_2: Oh.
SPEAKER_3: Yeah.
SPEAKER_3: Well.
SPEAKER_3: Today, we actually have another guest, and today it's Eugene Sandulenko from SrummVM, one of the project leaders.
SPEAKER_3: Welcome to the show.
SPEAKER_4: Yes.
SPEAKER_4: Hello, everyone.
SPEAKER_4: Nice to meet you.
SPEAKER_3: Wonderful.
SPEAKER_3: So actually, it started a bit like normally I was using SrummVM as user, but recently we prepared for an interview for Program Sword 2.5, and I thought like, well, let's write in the forum there and report some bugs.
SPEAKER_3: To my surprise, you have been really on the call on this one.
SPEAKER_3: I mean, one day you virtually fixed almost all the bugs I reported in the game, and I was like, wow, they are really onto things.
SPEAKER_4: Yes.
SPEAKER_4: And the problem with SrummVM is that we support way too many games, so users do not always test those.
SPEAKER_4: So we truly appreciate when people come and report, because also sometimes I'm going like working around the Internet and on random forums I find complaints, which could be really easy to fix, but we just don't know.
SPEAKER_4: So thank you very much for actually reaching out and help us.
SPEAKER_4: We didn't know those things were sitting there for 15 years unfixed.
SPEAKER_4: Now they're fixed.
SPEAKER_3: Awesome.
SPEAKER_3: Yeah.
SPEAKER_3: Well, I mean, perhaps let's start a bit with your beginning personally.
SPEAKER_3: I mean, how did you become a co-project leader?
SPEAKER_3: I mean, I saw in the archives of the homepage that you started being a co-project leader in 2016.
SPEAKER_3: So eight years ago, actually.
SPEAKER_3: And in the announcement, they actually wrote that you did a lot of help to the project towards fixing bugs in the engines.
SPEAKER_3: But I guess there must be a story way before, like what got you into computers and stuff?
SPEAKER_4: Actually, I co-lead the project since 2007.
SPEAKER_4: So this is like when it started.
SPEAKER_4: Sixteen now, this is, I already was like, in the year 16, I was like before that for several years, I was a sole project lead.
SPEAKER_4: And in 16, I was able to find the help of other folks.
SPEAKER_4: And this is like why I became like co-lead.
SPEAKER_4: But how I did go there, like I joined the project in 2003.
SPEAKER_4: And I get pretty involved into the project.
SPEAKER_4: And then at this moment, we had two co-leads.
SPEAKER_4: We had Max Horn, a car, Fingal Finn and Ender, James Brown.
SPEAKER_4: But unfortunately, James was already by that time, quite busy with the real life.
SPEAKER_4: Then he was busy with Quake, source ports and everything.
SPEAKER_4: And this is like why I stepped in and started gradually increase my involvement, adding additional engines, like if I remember correctly, it was Goblin's engine, Inherit the Earth engine, which is called Saga.
SPEAKER_4: And then after working pretty closely with Max, Max Horn, Finkelfin, we became again duo, and James officially stepped down because we were waiting like five years until he steps down.
SPEAKER_4: But then later, I don't even remember when exactly, I was not checking, maybe 2011, 12, Max left the project.
SPEAKER_4: He completed his study and I was alone.
SPEAKER_4: Like I left alone as a project lead for a while.
SPEAKER_4: And it is pretty big task because the active core is about 150 developers.
SPEAKER_4: And typically in a year, like three to 500 people are contributing.
SPEAKER_4: So it's a task, pretty big task.
SPEAKER_4: So I was looking for somebody who would help me, and then Lothar Rootfather stepped in and then stepped up.
SPEAKER_4: And then we finally had a back merger of our sister project ResigioVM and two leads of the project, Somayan and Aquadron.
SPEAKER_4: Naturally, I was inviting them to be colleagues.
SPEAKER_4: So now we are four.
SPEAKER_4: So this is how the project is being governed, I would say.
SPEAKER_3: Awesome.
SPEAKER_3: I mean, for 22 years now, it's amazing to be involved in a project for so long.
SPEAKER_3: And I actually found out when I was researching for this interview that you also have a blog that you rarely, but sometimes update.
SPEAKER_3: And you actually have an interesting blog post there where you wrote about the early taps into supporting LucasArts adventure games and how you were unsure if they were actually fine with SrummVM reverse engineering their newer versions of SrummVM for the project.
SPEAKER_3: So, but I guess in the end, it worked out fine because nowadays, even many commercial players use SrummVM in their GOG and Steam releases as their primary driver of offering the game.
SPEAKER_4: They're not just using.
SPEAKER_4: We have successful collaborations.
SPEAKER_4: For instance, one of the first of those collaborations were the Broken Sword games, when we were working very closely with Revolution Software and Broken Sword 1 and 2 became actually de facto standard and later where even the later re-releases were using ScumVM for portability reasons.
SPEAKER_4: Then we had a really nice truly commercial collaboration with the Tony engine, Tony Roth, I believe this is the game name.
SPEAKER_4: So the French company who acquired the rights and had the source code, they approached us, they handed us officially the source code and asked us to develop it over the tree.
SPEAKER_4: Because once we told them that the development on the engine is complete, they then made a press release and put it into the market right away, without us first coming to with the engine.
SPEAKER_4: But it was just synchronized.
SPEAKER_4: Then another great, great collaboration with the Sion.
SPEAKER_4: Though we really love working with those guys.
SPEAKER_4: We were re-implementing Riven and Myst 25th Anniversary Edition.
SPEAKER_4: What we were doing there, pretty cool, is that Riven particularly was released on six different languages.
SPEAKER_4: If you remember, each game was consistent of five CDs.
SPEAKER_4: So putting all six wouldn't fit on DVD.
SPEAKER_4: So what we did, since it was official released by the actual owners, we performed like clever combination of the resources, removing all of the duplicates.
SPEAKER_4: And instead of, I think we went from like 11 or 12 gigabytes worth of data to less than two, which was unique.
SPEAKER_4: And this, which was recompressed and now is part of the 25th anniversary edition.
SPEAKER_4: And then really, really recent collaboration was in regards of the spacebar game.
SPEAKER_4: So guys from the, there is this Zoom platform, not Zoom, which we used for similar to Skype, but there is a zoomplatform.com.
SPEAKER_4: It's a website similar to gog.com, good old games, where they acquire and redistribute the games.
SPEAKER_4: And also the same game spacebar is in Steam based on SrummVM.
SPEAKER_4: Because before that, they were able to release only on the original engine, which was really tied to Windows 98, was not functioning very well on modern Windows.
SPEAKER_4: And this is where we came to the salvage.
SPEAKER_4: So to answer in your question once again, I think that yes, we do have collaborations.
SPEAKER_4: However, speaking of the LucasArts folks, we had a lot of problems, especially at the beginning of the project with them.
SPEAKER_4: We survived two seas and disease slatters.
SPEAKER_4: Then it was a bit reversed.
SPEAKER_4: I was writing it in my blog, but it was not related to LucasArts, but to Humongous Entertainment Games when they released the Freddy Fish games Pajama Sam on Nintendo Wii, but they were violating GPL license, and this was pretty big, and we solved it, thankfully, pretty nicely.
SPEAKER_4: But then we didn't hear from LucasArts for a while, and then they were acquired by Disney.
SPEAKER_4: Nobody ever contacted us, but the Steam releases of the LucasArts games use ScummVM.
SPEAKER_4: So, we kind of indirectly know that they are fine, without existence and maybe even happy.
SPEAKER_4: There is one particular thing, by the way, maybe somebody will watch this interview, which we are very, very annoyed.
SPEAKER_4: We tried to contact the people, but we are not here.
SPEAKER_4: They release Manic Mansion on Steam, which is a badly cracked version, like, ask, ask, we will provide you original vanilla files.
SPEAKER_4: And then make it, because it makes a thing like dead ends in some places because crack in one place, in this script, and was affecting another place.
SPEAKER_4: And Eric Torbjorn, our long-term and scum expert, is very, very unhappy about this.
SPEAKER_4: He was trying to contact them for years now.
SPEAKER_4: Hey, please release the better version, update it.
SPEAKER_4: So if that happens, that would be really nice for preservation of the original game, because what is being sold on Steam is not original, is a patched, cracked version to remove the copy protection, which was manual-based at that time.
SPEAKER_2: We've seen that a couple of times, because when Nintendo released the mini-thing, their little game, a bunch of those games were just cracks that they grabbed off a line.
SPEAKER_2: It's amazing that they would use that sort of thing.
SPEAKER_4: Yeah.
SPEAKER_4: This is kind of sad part of the industry, and since we are working with those people, we faced it a number of times.
SPEAKER_4: The thing is that game studios very often run by artists and creative person, which are not specifically technically savvy, so their backup strategies are non-existent.
SPEAKER_4: How many times we were trying, even after successful reaching out the original IP owners, original people who wrote it, they have no backups, the source code is lost, the game assets are lost.
SPEAKER_4: And this is like why sometimes re-releases are a bit ugly, because they have to recreate it manually or something like this.
SPEAKER_4: Yes, that's a problem.
SPEAKER_4: I hope, by the way, one of our kind of goals of the project is to preserve those games, because we're making sure that they keep being portable, working on modern systems as best as possible.
SPEAKER_4: So hopefully, and meaning that particularly, I was mentioning several big collaborations, and there are even more smaller things.
SPEAKER_4: Those people who provided us with the source code, and we added support to ScamVM, made the game revived, maybe to some extent immortalized, and you know that, let me just do the little shameless plug about the project.
SPEAKER_4: We, for instance, have even web assembly port.
SPEAKER_4: So we will host it very soon, but now it's this hosted button on someone else's website.
SPEAKER_4: So basically, you source ScamVM when you run it, you can have exactly the same thing in the browser.
SPEAKER_4: Meaning that for the projects like archive.org, when they have effort of making some games available, they can offer ScamVM, so then you can just play and have these games working for the future generations.
SPEAKER_3: Yeah, now that you mention it, it's correct.
SPEAKER_3: Mostly, they are relying on DOSBox for those games, yeah.
SPEAKER_3: And I saw some abandonware websites even have packages of DOSBoxes with Windows 3.1 inside that will boot in the background, and be heavily modified, so you don't really see it as a user that Windows 3.1 is booting, but in the end, it boots Windows 3.1 and then the game itself.
SPEAKER_3: And so it's amazing to what length some people go to make old games play.
SPEAKER_3: So basically, you can get almost anything to work if you just know what you are doing.
SPEAKER_3: But one thing that is really important and I feel that wasn't really mentioned often is also SrummVM allows you to play games that have copy protections that are no longer supported by latest Windows versions, for example.
SPEAKER_3: Because you can basically...
SPEAKER_3: Well, the copy protection isn't actually triggered at all, because as I understand, SrummVM is not an emulator, but rather just uses the original game files and the scripting language behind, and well, operating with the assets of the game rather.
SPEAKER_4: So the best comparison understandable for the wide masses is the source port.
SPEAKER_4: We are a set of source ports.
SPEAKER_4: So we took original source code, either directly or via reverse engineering, and we just ported it to the modder, and we developed a specific framework which provides hardware abstraction, which is called OSYSTEM.
SPEAKER_4: And as long as you remove all of the system-dependent things like graphics, audio, file access, and use it with OSYSTEM, then the original engine is just working.
SPEAKER_4: So this is why we, being not emulator, are able to fix original game bugs, because we have the engine, we are working directly with it.
SPEAKER_4: Sometimes we even fix or patch scripts on the fly, which would be not so possible in emulators, in emulation software, unless you like do binary patches and stuff like this.
SPEAKER_4: I wanted to mention something.
SPEAKER_4: You mentioned this term, a vendor, where you know that this is piracy.
SPEAKER_4: There is no such thing as a vendor.
SPEAKER_3: I know, I know.
SPEAKER_3: But then the problem is, if it's not an archive.org, and you can't get the game commercially, and there's no copy on eBay or whatsoever.
SPEAKER_3: So what are your options?
SPEAKER_4: It doesn't make it legal anyway.
SPEAKER_4: Of course, I mean, we as a project are not a police, and whatever people are doing in their homes, it's up to them.
SPEAKER_4: We are not looking to pick.
SPEAKER_4: But if you come to the project and you mention, hey, I don't know that this ISO file, how to run it.
SPEAKER_4: Since our public channels are being indexed by Google, we for the sake of the safety of developers, don't refuse to provide any support in this case.
SPEAKER_4: Because I do not want again season disease letters, just because we support piracy.
SPEAKER_4: This is one of the reasons behind certain decisions for the project.
SPEAKER_4: For instance, while it would be technically just basic, we don't support running out of ZIP archives.
SPEAKER_4: Because we know that the torrents are distributing those games in ZIP format, and people are lazy, they would like just to play, they don't care about money.
SPEAKER_4: But what we saw, and this is our project, it's somehow responsible for this, for the wave on bringing old classics to the market.
SPEAKER_4: Because now there are ways of playing this, and this is like why there are certain companies, big and small, which are acquiring intellectual property rights, or the original authors are doing this, and they are able to sell it.
SPEAKER_4: But if, let's say, it is super wildly available for everyone, they will not pay, they will not get money.
SPEAKER_4: Take a look, for instance, at this marvelous thing which is happening.
SPEAKER_4: Oh, I forgot his last name.
SPEAKER_4: Pierre, the author of the Goblins games.
SPEAKER_3: He did a new entry in the series.
SPEAKER_4: Last year, he released Goblins V.
SPEAKER_4: Now, he's working on Goblins VI.
SPEAKER_4: Or consider Revolution Software.
SPEAKER_4: We are kind of partially responsible also for making Broken Sword games available, playable.
SPEAKER_4: Then they'd meet a really good move of freeware beneath a still sky.
SPEAKER_4: And that run their studio, and then later they were able to release and sell Broken Sword II through V, which is happening now.
SPEAKER_4: And yes, because we are responsible.
SPEAKER_4: But if we would, for kind of archival excuses, would say, hey, we would collect and we will make these games available for everyone who wants it just for free, just because we want this, because they deserve it, this would not be possible.
SPEAKER_3: I mean, that is actually the problem.
SPEAKER_3: The archive, Internet Archive is running into with a couple of things recently, especially for vinyl records or books, for example.
SPEAKER_4: So, yes.
SPEAKER_4: And while I'm personally not happy about this, I also would like to have the things like available, especially when they are out of print, when the company, let's say, like if a game studio like Sierra was producing a game, they had the projection for the sales, hey, and if we sell it for 200,000, that's enough, then later it's just a profit and then no sales.
SPEAKER_4: Why not put it on the market?
SPEAKER_4: But that's the one thing is being just happy or not happy as a human, and second one is violating some law which can come after.
SPEAKER_3: True.
SPEAKER_3: Well, you mentioned different platforms being supported, and one question of Ajay was actually that he said, he is a bit confused about the requirement for the Amiga framework.
SPEAKER_2: When we were looking at the broken sword deal, that uses a lot of the SrummVM.
SPEAKER_2: I saw some people posting that it was running on 68K machines, although the SrummVM requirements I see are OS4, which only runs on PowerPC.
SPEAKER_2: So that was just my, didn't know if it actually ran on older Amigas.
SPEAKER_4: Okay.
SPEAKER_4: Are you sure it wasn't regarding broken swords?
SPEAKER_4: Okay.
SPEAKER_4: What I know is this.
SPEAKER_4: First of all, we have Amiga OS4 project for a long while, port, and we have a very enthusiastic German guy, Keith, who is pushing and continuing and keeping it up to date always.
SPEAKER_4: He's Amiga lover, he spends now, I know extra for getting Amiga boxes, but still he runs this, he re-use those.
SPEAKER_4: But then there was additional gentleman who came to us, and unfortunately his work was not mergeable.
SPEAKER_4: He wanted to port certain games, at least some of them, to the original Amiga.
SPEAKER_4: But in order to make it work, he picked scum-based games.
SPEAKER_4: So he picked, I believe, like Manik mentioned, Monkey Island and Indiana Jones, the very early ones.
SPEAKER_4: And then he ripped off everything else, but it was not enough, it was not performing.
SPEAKER_4: So what he had to do in the end, he knows that Amiga has a very unique video subsystem with the bit planes.
SPEAKER_4: So what he had to do, he had to write utility, which takes original game resources, pre-process them, unfold them into this thing, and then you can run it with the proper frame rate or this proper performance.
SPEAKER_4: And it was very, very much of the manual work because he had to unwind some loops, rewrite some things.
SPEAKER_4: I don't believe he had to write anything in assembly.
SPEAKER_4: But he certainly had to go on a pretty low level in the DC language optimizations because there is not enough power.
SPEAKER_4: And very similarly, there was additional, even cooler project I consider even cooler.
SPEAKER_4: There are enthusiasts which created from the scratch a new 8-bit machine.
SPEAKER_4: I forgot what its name, but they actually did the same thing with the SCUMM engine, then make it running on 8-bit, I guess 16 or 32-bit on 8-bit machine.
SPEAKER_4: That's fantastic.
SPEAKER_2: Yeah.
SPEAKER_2: Could that have been the Commander X16?
SPEAKER_2: I'm trying to think of enthusiast designed machines, and that's one of the ones that's very...
SPEAKER_4: I can try to Google it for a moment if I remember, but maybe it's for later, maybe it's not good for the interview.
SPEAKER_4: But you can search 8-bit machine, and they can make it physical, you can buy it, and they have ScummVM port and some other interesting games.
SPEAKER_4: 8-bit machine, ScummVM.
SPEAKER_2: There is a Pico 8 version.
SPEAKER_4: No, Pico is a cheating.
SPEAKER_3: Yeah.
SPEAKER_4: No, I don't remember.
SPEAKER_4: I cannot find it right now.
SPEAKER_2: No problem.
SPEAKER_2: We'll look up afterwards, see if we can find it.
SPEAKER_3: Yes.
SPEAKER_3: But yes, you're right.
SPEAKER_3: I saw some videos of the guy making ScummVM run on native Amigas, and they were pretty slow.
SPEAKER_3: I think one recording was full throttle, and the other one I saw was the first broken sword, and it was really, really slow, like a slideshow.
SPEAKER_4: Yes.
SPEAKER_4: Full throttle, it is ScummVM version 7, and they became more and more sophisticated scripting, like really, really complex inside.
SPEAKER_4: And a lot of things like Human Ghost went even further.
SPEAKER_4: For instance, one of their most complex games, which is Moonbase Commander, which is ScummVM, same engine as Maniac Mansion was written.
SPEAKER_4: But it consists of three rooms.
SPEAKER_4: Everything is written on the scripts.
SPEAKER_4: So you can consider that everything is interpreted on a slower virtual machine with the pseudocodes, with the p-code.
SPEAKER_4: And it's very slow.
SPEAKER_4: It's quite resource demanding.
SPEAKER_4: And for Full Throttle, it makes even more difficult because they and Rebel are sold.
SPEAKER_4: They're using Insane subsystem.
SPEAKER_4: Insane is a subsystem when you have a video.
SPEAKER_4: And then on this video, you can have overlays.
SPEAKER_4: So, in Full Throttle, it is used for the bike fights.
SPEAKER_4: This is my first serious project in SrummVM.
SPEAKER_4: I started in 2003 and completed it.
SPEAKER_4: And for the PCs of 2003, it was put in a big toil of having this performing well.
SPEAKER_4: So, working on the original Amiga could be even more than miracles, I would say.
SPEAKER_3: Wow.
SPEAKER_3: Yeah, I mean, you know a lot about those games.
SPEAKER_3: I wonder, how do you decide which games to support and which you don't?
SPEAKER_3: I mean, there are also games that, when I try to run them as SrummVM, there's a message coming up like, this game is not running fully or it's in beta stages and for the later releases, the save games might stop working.
SPEAKER_3: So there is really a lot of games that are half way supported, but not fully, but it's sometimes a mixed bag.
SPEAKER_3: I remember recently, I found out about the German adventure game, Ein-ein-halb-Ritter, which actually says on the wiki that it's fully supported, but I still get the message saying that the support is in beta stages, and later versions might make the save game stop working.
SPEAKER_3: But when I play the game, it's fully working for me.
SPEAKER_3: The only differences I found is SrummVM puts in an auto-save function which the game originally doesn't have.
SPEAKER_3: So that makes the whole screen go blank for a fraction of a second every four minutes.
SPEAKER_3: So I wonder how that works.
SPEAKER_4: You can turn off.
SPEAKER_4: You can select the auto-save period or turn it off completely.
SPEAKER_3: Good to know.
SPEAKER_3: But anyway, the question is, the question is how do you decide which games to support and fully and half support or broken?
SPEAKER_4: That's a very good question.
SPEAKER_4: So first of all, since we are source ports, basically implementing all of the logic of the original game executable, just everything, adding support is not just you go and add.
SPEAKER_4: If some game, for instance, based on existing engine, like there are certain engines which actually created as the authoring platforms like a adventure game studio, AGS, or Wintermute.
SPEAKER_4: So to give you a great example, coming back to the Goblins, Goblins 5 and Goblins 6 are AGS based games.
SPEAKER_4: So since the engine is already there, adding that game is easy, just matter of checking that it is working, adding the checksum, and here we go.
SPEAKER_4: But normally, if you have a random game, that would mean that somebody has to re-implement the whole logic, like everything end-to-end, understand it and write it in a way that it is just flawless, right?
SPEAKER_4: In those cases, when we have access to the original source code, this is much easier, but still very often complicated things.
SPEAKER_4: Because, for instance, a lot of games in the 90s, they had code written in assembly, sometimes, like at least pieces of this, this has to be rewritten in C++ or in C.
SPEAKER_4: Or those games could do some trickery with the direct access to memory or whatever, because they are being dosed in multi-user, in a single-user system.
SPEAKER_4: So those needs to be also rewritten, et cetera, et cetera.
SPEAKER_4: So meaning that even if it's a source code, it is several months of the project.
SPEAKER_4: Like very recently, we added support for QD engine.
SPEAKER_4: QD engine, it's an engine for the KDA Lab, which is a Russian studio, which is now defunct.
SPEAKER_4: And their owner had a mishap.
SPEAKER_4: He unfortunately passed away from the very bad accident.
SPEAKER_4: And as a result of his will or whatever, how it's happened, all of the games, and all of the releases which they ever had, they published the source code of those.
SPEAKER_4: And this is why we took the original source code, which is about 40,000 lines of code.
SPEAKER_4: And even with the original source code, and it was written pretty decently, the support took us over five months of work.
SPEAKER_4: So this is when we have source code.
SPEAKER_4: In case we don't have a source code, you have just executable, and you start poking around.
SPEAKER_4: You start loading into this assembler and starting to figure out what is this.
SPEAKER_4: And it is a soup of instructions.
SPEAKER_4: There are no names, no variable names, just the numbers, addresses, etc.
SPEAKER_4: So you start the process, like really, really painful process of release engineering, which easily can take years, just literally years.
SPEAKER_4: One of the bigger projects which we have is Blade Runner.
SPEAKER_4: I wanted to have this support so much, but when I was taking a look at it every time, I was saying, oh, no, because the game itself has an executable, which is pretty big, like around 500 kilobytes.
SPEAKER_4: But then for every character and for every room, it has a separate DLL.
SPEAKER_4: So it had 98 DLLs.
SPEAKER_4: Each one of them has to be reverse engineered.
SPEAKER_4: So we started several times, stopped several times, started, stopped, stopped.
SPEAKER_4: And then Peter Kohout finally arrived to our project, which like released reverse big part of it.
SPEAKER_4: And then we made the last push.
SPEAKER_4: But nevertheless, it take us eight and a half years to reverse engineer this game.
SPEAKER_4: Eight and a half years.
SPEAKER_4: And this is like we are talking of people like me, I was part of the project.
SPEAKER_4: By that time, I had like 20 years of reverse engineering experience.
SPEAKER_4: So it's not an, it is just huge work, even if you have experience, if you know how to do it.
SPEAKER_4: Because come on, the final engine is about like 120,000 lines of code.
SPEAKER_4: Just printing it, it's enormous.
SPEAKER_4: So now back to your question.
SPEAKER_4: In order for a certain game to be added to ScummVM, either we have the access to original source code and it is in a pretty decent form, or we have some crazy person with stones of time who is ready, who has so much love or passion and nostalgia for this game.
SPEAKER_4: So they are ready and skills for dedicating from half a year till like a couple of years on every night, head down, writing code, putting, trying, etc.
SPEAKER_4: This is why especially for those games which are being added through reverse engineering, we sometimes start in adding, but then people give up.
SPEAKER_4: One of the great examples like this is the last express game.
SPEAKER_4: I still keep it in three, but it has been in three, four, what?
SPEAKER_4: 17 years, 18.
SPEAKER_4: So soon it will be like a full grown adult, sitting in our, it can drink soon.
SPEAKER_4: But it is like 95 percent complete.
SPEAKER_4: All the logic is implemented, and what needs to be done is debugging.
SPEAKER_4: But the game itself is super, super complex because what it does, it's internally, it runs clock, and then certain things are being triggered just by the clock, and it goes in parallel.
SPEAKER_4: So it has all of those compartments inside, like it's a last express, it's a murder story.
SPEAKER_3: Yeah, I know it.
SPEAKER_4: It's one of my favorite game, actually.
SPEAKER_4: Yeah.
SPEAKER_4: Yes.
SPEAKER_4: In every compartment, there are certain actions happening, and inside of the engine, this is like timeline implemented with, if now it is, I don't know, midnight, and then this happened, and this didn't happen, then do this way.
SPEAKER_4: So it is very, very difficult to just debug.
SPEAKER_4: And this is like why the game is sitting in this state.
SPEAKER_4: We wish that there will be some dedicated person who loves the game, who knows the game, and this person would just sit and try to complete it, and then we announce it.
SPEAKER_4: Also, we know that the original source code was preserved, and it is sitting in some museum in the United States, I think in New York state.
SPEAKER_4: I don't remember if it's possible to Google.
SPEAKER_4: And we were already considering trying to find somebody who will go physically there and make a copy, but we just cannot find this person who would be helping us.
SPEAKER_4: Or maybe they will not be able to make a copy of this, but at least we would then ask them to take a look at the specific places which are problematic and help us to solve those bags and make the game supported.
SPEAKER_4: So these are the reasons.
SPEAKER_4: So you would need to find somebody who will dedicate enormous amounts of time on completely understanding all the inner workings of the game, re-implementing it for ScummVM, and do it.
SPEAKER_4: Two days ago, we had a gentleman who popped up on our Discord server and he thought, hey, I'm an author of this Amiga game.
SPEAKER_4: It was released back then, but I'm passionate about it and I'm an original developer.
SPEAKER_4: I wrote certain things in C, so it is now all in C.
SPEAKER_4: I would like to bring it to ScummVM.
SPEAKER_4: So this is one of the such examples.
SPEAKER_3: But now the question is in case of The Last Express, it has been re-released and modified to work on modern system and re-published by.emu.
SPEAKER_3: I guess it's not possible to just ask the current publisher to help.
SPEAKER_4: With.emu, we were working on Tony, he really is actually, we are in a good relationship with them.
SPEAKER_4: But the re-release is not based on the source code.
SPEAKER_4: It is just tweaking of the original executable making it work.
SPEAKER_4: So unfortunately, they, with their new re-release, they don't have access to that source code.
SPEAKER_3: So they found other ways to make it work?
SPEAKER_3: Yes.
SPEAKER_4: I mean, it's like, as you were mentioning, it could be those box in these guys.
SPEAKER_3: I mean, I don't have the original release.
SPEAKER_3: I only have the Steam release, which is the gold edition, if I'm not mistaken.
SPEAKER_3: So they did reprogram or put in some other interface.
SPEAKER_3: So they got it working somehow.
SPEAKER_3: But I understand, your problem is you need the source code or at least a reverse engineered version of it.
SPEAKER_2: Which lives at the Strong National Museum of Play, I believe, in Rochester, New York.
SPEAKER_4: Okay.
SPEAKER_4: Right.
SPEAKER_2: I would have said, I live pretty close to New York.
SPEAKER_2: I was thinking I could go up there, but Rochester is like a weekend trip.
SPEAKER_2: That's a ride.
SPEAKER_2: That's way up there.
SPEAKER_3: But hey, you could be the hero.
SPEAKER_3: You could be the hero of Scania.
SPEAKER_2: Rochester.
SPEAKER_2: No one's gotten up there.
SPEAKER_2: Next time I go up there, I'll swing by.
SPEAKER_2: Awesome.
SPEAKER_3: Yeah.
SPEAKER_4: It reminds me about 15 years ago, we were in the Stanford University looking through the Steve Mareckis archives because he was very meticulous archivist.
SPEAKER_4: And this is by the way, how the space bar code was finally located.
SPEAKER_4: And this is like, well, now it is on ScummVM and on market.
SPEAKER_2: Interesting.
SPEAKER_4: Okay.
SPEAKER_3: Yeah.
SPEAKER_3: It's quite interesting because you mentioned, you mentioned Lucasfilm or LucasArts games.
SPEAKER_2: You went through like a multi-year process with them, right?
SPEAKER_2: To show them that you weren't using their code.
SPEAKER_4: They were sending us two times season and this is between the tries maybe like five years.
SPEAKER_4: As we were speculating apparently when maybe the illegal team was renewed and somebody, oh, this is an old case, not close.
SPEAKER_4: Let us slap them again.
SPEAKER_4: And I barely touched the first one, which was in 2003 when I just joined the project.
SPEAKER_4: It was almost complete of it.
SPEAKER_4: And then the second one, like I think 2007, maybe 2007, and I don't remember exactly when they sent us, so like scary, scary thing.
SPEAKER_4: They thought exactly that we are redistributing the intellectual property.
SPEAKER_4: We said, no, we don't.
SPEAKER_4: And then they said, oh, but then you are using our, like our opcodes.
SPEAKER_4: And even in the United States law, it is possible to re-implement the same thing.
SPEAKER_4: But in Europe, actually reverse engineering is completely legal.
SPEAKER_4: So DMCA is defunct in Europe, and most of the ScummVM developers are actually in Europe.
SPEAKER_4: You can reverse engineer with the goal of increasing interoperability, exactly our project.
SPEAKER_3: But you mentioned earlier that they are using ScummVM also in their Goc and Stream releases.
SPEAKER_3: But actually, I found out recently that their 1989 release, Indiana Jones and The Last Crusade, actually uses apparently neither DOSBox nor ScummVM, but some kind of different platform for emulating it on modern Windows systems.
SPEAKER_3: Because if you look in the community, people are like the...
SPEAKER_3: And I actually experienced that myself, because I bought a license of Amazon Germany.
SPEAKER_3: They offer it for 4 euros, a Steam license, Steam Key.
SPEAKER_3: And the graphics and the sound emulation is so bad, that it's even worse than what DOSBox would offer for their AdLib and PC speaker emulation.
SPEAKER_3: So that really surprised me that they apparently came up with something on their own that is much, much worse than what is already out there.
SPEAKER_3: So it's one of those games where I'm like, okay, I'm not playing it in this state.
SPEAKER_3: Let's add it to SrummVM and play it the proper way.
SPEAKER_4: There is recently appeared a really interesting way of running.
SPEAKER_4: It started with LucasArts game.
SPEAKER_4: Did you heard about Dream?
SPEAKER_4: D-R-E-A-M-M?
SPEAKER_1: Yes, I heard about it.
SPEAKER_4: By Aaron Giles.
SPEAKER_3: It's a one-person project, right?
SPEAKER_4: Aaron Giles is the guy who is behind the original ports to Windows 95 of LucasArts games.
SPEAKER_4: Then he was very, very big in main multi-arcade machine emulator.
SPEAKER_4: So he's very, very technically savvy person.
SPEAKER_4: And particularly for this one, since he was porting this to Windows, he decided to write it in a very, it's like basically as a DOS box, but for specific sets of the games.
SPEAKER_4: So what he is doing, he is writing the original executable.
SPEAKER_4: But when there are calls to DOS, he intercepts those and executes his own code.
SPEAKER_4: And later he added Windows for the Windows games to cover everything.
SPEAKER_4: And then it was easier for him.
SPEAKER_4: For him now it is easier and easier to add new games.
SPEAKER_4: So I see that he's started to throw in some random things he likes, or maybe some requests for making these games working better and better.
SPEAKER_4: We took a couple of nice ideas from him in order particularly for how to run it automatically.
SPEAKER_4: And he inspired us, Airon, to do the things which was kind of nagging us for a long while.
SPEAKER_4: Since, as I mentioned to you, we had to reverse engineer things and we started to reverse engineer in SCUMM games, SCUMM-based games.
SPEAKER_4: We were lazy to reverse engineer the original UI, like save dialogues.
SPEAKER_4: We were using our SCUMM VM once, always.
SPEAKER_4: But recently, and after looking at Airon and his Dream emulator, we were inspired to just re-implement everything and went even further in the release which is going to be released just next week on 22nd of December 2.9.0.
SPEAKER_4: We are even emulating or re-implementing classic Mac dialogues, which is used for the Mac, the Mac, Indiana Jones, Macintosh Monkey Island, and Macintosh Loom with those black and white things, with the menus, with everything, like Pixel Perfect, the guys were chasing Pixel Perfect, running it in emulators and seeing the real hardware in order to compare it.
SPEAKER_4: That's fun.
SPEAKER_2: That is.
SPEAKER_2: I'm looking forward to that because I actually, most of my games that I have in SrummVM are the Mac versions of Monkey Island, all those games, and when I stopped using a 68K Mac, I couldn't use them anymore.
SPEAKER_2: So, they're in SrummVM.
SPEAKER_4: Just don't cry too much when you see those interfaces, which you didn't see for 25 years.
SPEAKER_2: Yeah, exactly.
SPEAKER_3: It's amazing.
SPEAKER_3: Yeah, it's interesting that you mentioned it because, if I'm not mistaken, on his project page, he actually writes that he specifically doesn't want to work with other people, but as a sole developer, he doesn't want anybody participating in it, because he wants to do it his way.
SPEAKER_3: So if I'm not mistaken, that also means it's not open source.
SPEAKER_3: It's closed source.
SPEAKER_3: Yeah, then it's actually, it's the same project.
SPEAKER_3: I had a look a few weeks ago.
SPEAKER_3: Yeah.
SPEAKER_3: So doesn't that kind of, I don't know, defeat the purpose of having so much, well, projects doing the same thing, running coherent next to each other?
SPEAKER_3: Wouldn't it be better to have, I don't know, combined forces?
SPEAKER_3: I mean, if I'm not mistaken in the history of SrummVM, there has been actually a case.
SPEAKER_3: I remember I was reading about the history that originally there was also a separate project for 3D game.
SPEAKER_4: Residual VM.
SPEAKER_4: I was mentioning it.
SPEAKER_4: We had a merger in 2008.
SPEAKER_4: Sorry, 2016.
SPEAKER_3: What was it again called?
SPEAKER_4: Residual VM.
SPEAKER_4: Yeah.
SPEAKER_4: It's called Residual because it is residual of SrummVM, of Srumm based games which are not fit into the project.
SPEAKER_4: We are Srumm project and that is residual.
SPEAKER_4: The leftovers.
SPEAKER_2: Right.
SPEAKER_2: Are there are games that it handles that don't use the SCUMM engine at this point?
SPEAKER_2: Correct?
SPEAKER_4: The project of SrummVM started in 2001 in October.
SPEAKER_4: In 2001, in November or December, we had first non-SCUMM engine added to this.
SPEAKER_4: So people think and people sometimes feel there is a misconception for the whole life of the project, that it is only about SCUMM games.
SPEAKER_4: No.
SPEAKER_4: Right away, Seamone game, later we renamed it into Agos, for the Seamone, the Sorcerer was added.
SPEAKER_4: And then we added more and more games.
SPEAKER_4: Then we had the original source code for Berenice's Steel Sky, for the Flight of Amazon Queen.
SPEAKER_4: Then I was joining the project at the time, and then we added the Goblins game engine.
SPEAKER_4: Then we have Saga engine for Inherit the Earth.
SPEAKER_4: And then it just snowballed.
SPEAKER_4: Now we have, if I remember correctly, 108 different age engines.
SPEAKER_4: And we now like 4.6 million lines of code.
SPEAKER_4: It's a huge project.
SPEAKER_4: It's one of the biggest projects in open source.
SPEAKER_4: But coming back to your question about this.
SPEAKER_4: So first of all, Dream and SrummVM are completely different approaches to the same thing.
SPEAKER_4: Dream is running the original executable and makes it just easier versus running it in those box when you need to learn the DOS commands, it like set up your sound card, whatever it does, it automatically picks up because it knows about these specific games.
SPEAKER_4: So consider it as the fine-tuned DOS environment specifically for these games.
SPEAKER_4: And so this is like incompatible by the concept.
SPEAKER_4: But coming back to your question, do you find it's bad that we have 86 box, VMware, QEMU, why don't they merge?
SPEAKER_4: This is kind of beauty of the open source.
SPEAKER_4: And you know that every software developer likes to reinvent their own bicycle anyway.
SPEAKER_4: There are sometimes egos, there are sometimes experiences when you learn about this.
SPEAKER_4: Another great example for you, why do we have not hundreds but thousands of different Linux distributions?
SPEAKER_3: Right.
SPEAKER_2: Yeah.
SPEAKER_3: Right.
SPEAKER_2: Yeah.
SPEAKER_2: How do you decide if you've got a game that you're talking about bringing in that maybe doesn't necessarily share any of the scripting with?
SPEAKER_2: Like a couple of years back, the absolute classic, plumbers don't wear ties, was added to it.
SPEAKER_4: It was April 4th joke, which we then from April 2nd told, no, it's not a joke.
SPEAKER_2: And I don't think that uses any of the, to my knowledge, that is probably a one-off.
SPEAKER_2: What is the decision process for saying like, okay, we have a game here that doesn't share an engine with any other game.
SPEAKER_2: Let's bring that in and retro-engineer that to work with VM.
SPEAKER_4: As I mentioned to you, we need somebody interested.
SPEAKER_4: That's it.
SPEAKER_4: So there should be a developer who wants to work on it and who joins the project.
SPEAKER_4: That's it.
SPEAKER_4: Very often, people join already with half-baked engine.
SPEAKER_4: Sometimes they start with something else, like or even write in SDL, and then they come to us and say, hey, I would like to port to ScamVM.
SPEAKER_4: Sometimes they come, like recently guy appeared, I would like to add support for the ZM.
SPEAKER_4: Can you explain me the process?
SPEAKER_4: We explained the process.
SPEAKER_4: Well, he disappeared, but this is where it happened.
SPEAKER_4: We have actually dozens of engines outside of the tree.
SPEAKER_4: You can find those on Wiki.
SPEAKER_4: We tried to catalogue them, which are a different stage of completeness outside of the tree not yet ready to be merged back.
SPEAKER_4: So this is why we tried.
SPEAKER_4: Speaking of the Plumbers game, what was interesting and why we decided to do it?
SPEAKER_4: Because somebody look at it, I think it was even got a trophy of the most disgusting and stupid game in some year, because it's so outrageously.
SPEAKER_4: It's just basically a slideshow.
SPEAKER_2: Even though it says it's FMV, it's just a slideshow, voiceover.
SPEAKER_4: Yeah, exactly.
SPEAKER_4: But what was interesting, when we first implemented it and we implemented support only for the Windows version, it had the smallest, the tiniest engine, 500 lines.
SPEAKER_2: Wow.
SPEAKER_4: That was the whole engine end-to-end.
SPEAKER_4: Now it is like I think three times more, one and a half thousand, I believe, because we added support for 3DO version.
SPEAKER_4: Because 3DO has a different picture format, so we had to add.
SPEAKER_4: But this is very, very primitive and simple thing.
SPEAKER_4: Yeah, this is what we do.
SPEAKER_4: When there is some interest or sometimes people come to us and we still have, we also watch in the world, sometimes developers release their source codes and the wild and they're just sitting.
SPEAKER_4: I was giving hints to Paul, Dream Master, who is one of the SrummVM old timers, and he's doing very complex things and very big ones.
SPEAKER_4: He was working now at the M4 engine, which is used for Orion Burger and Riddle of Master Lou.
SPEAKER_4: And those games has really, really badly hardcoded logic, and it's so boring to reverse engineer.
SPEAKER_4: And he was asking, Hey, Eugene, do you have anything like I would like to switch the gears over the Christmas?
SPEAKER_4: And I was directing him to the old game, which was released, the source code.
SPEAKER_4: It's called God of Thunder, very small RPG.
SPEAKER_4: And last Friday, we started to have this little, how to say, tradition in the project.
SPEAKER_4: We say we have it Friday screenshot.
SPEAKER_4: So random developers working on different things on Friday, they put a screenshot of their progress.
SPEAKER_4: And last Friday, Paul already published the screenshot of the first screens in-game for this little engine.
SPEAKER_2: Awesome.
SPEAKER_4: Let me probably explain you a little bit.
SPEAKER_4: There are several kinds of games or game engines which are used for point and click adventures.
SPEAKER_4: There are single game engines, which were used only for one game.
SPEAKER_4: Very often, this also contains all of the logic embedded in the executable.
SPEAKER_4: So you have to reverse engineer everything.
SPEAKER_4: Then there are multi-game engines like Scumm.
SPEAKER_4: But very often, the engine itself was developed through the year.
SPEAKER_4: And the typical approach for those years was just to make a source scope and start hacking it.
SPEAKER_4: So what we do, we assemble it together, which was never a single version running for everything.
SPEAKER_4: For the Scumm games, there are over 20 different versions of it.
SPEAKER_4: Now we embed everything into one executable, but you would need executable for every game or for every release of the game.
SPEAKER_4: And finally, there are engines which were created for authoring.
SPEAKER_4: So we're not created around the game, but in order to create games.
SPEAKER_4: As I mentioned, Adventure Games Studio, like you open and you start writing scripts, like Wintermute, Sludge, like another open source engine for creating games.
SPEAKER_4: And recently, which we are working on, Micro Media Director, which is also Authority 2, which was used for many different games.
SPEAKER_4: So those are from the perspective on the internals, how it works.
SPEAKER_4: And then you have scripted engines and you have hard-coded engines.
SPEAKER_4: If the engine is scripted, that means that the game logic would be in the scripts and they will sit into the game data.
SPEAKER_4: And hard-coded is when everything is written just in C, Pascal, or even Wars Assembly.
SPEAKER_4: So it could be very painful to reverse.
SPEAKER_2: Right.
SPEAKER_3: But every game you support has to be an adventure game of some sort.
SPEAKER_2: Oh, no.
SPEAKER_4: Adventures and we recently, relatively recently, like maybe what, eight years ago, recently, but for 22 years project, we started also accept RPGs.
SPEAKER_4: Just because we run out of the long-hanging fruits for adventures.
SPEAKER_4: And then even for adventures, we started with the only point and click, strictly point and click.
SPEAKER_4: But at this moment, we already embraced text-based adventures in direct-to-fiction.
SPEAKER_4: We merged with the RACI-Govm, so 3D adventures, like one of the almost finished engines in 3, Penumbra Overture, which is survival.
SPEAKER_4: And we recently also started to add FMVs.
SPEAKER_4: So true FMVs, not like plumbers.
SPEAKER_4: And yes, so like our kind of, some people are not so happy about this.
SPEAKER_4: Stay focused, stay focused.
SPEAKER_4: But this is the thing.
SPEAKER_4: We, the engines or the games which we left unsupported, either super niche or hard-coded, which are very, very difficult to reverse.
SPEAKER_4: So like we would like to progress on something.
SPEAKER_4: So this is like why we kind of losing the focus to some extent.
SPEAKER_4: But from the other hand, the number of developers, I'm happy to tell that number of developers in the project only grows with the years.
SPEAKER_4: Of course, we had folks which left, but the overall size of the team is bigger and bigger, and more people are working on whatever they like to work on.
SPEAKER_2: But it also got-
SPEAKER_2: You even got Hoyle's book of games.
SPEAKER_2: You've got card games and stuff in there as well, aside from this adventure and working on RPGs.
SPEAKER_4: But that's a different story.
SPEAKER_4: No, no, it's a different story.
SPEAKER_4: Hoyle's games are based on Sierra Creative Interpreter.
SPEAKER_2: Okay.
SPEAKER_4: It's exactly the same engine which runs Space Quest, Police Quest, Larry.
SPEAKER_4: It is just a matter of them implementing on this engine.
SPEAKER_4: Excuse me, we have Tetris.
SPEAKER_4: Did you know that we have Tetris?
SPEAKER_2: Do you?
SPEAKER_3: I didn't know I was talking about that.
SPEAKER_4: There is AGI.
SPEAKER_4: We have actually two.
SPEAKER_4: There is AGI, Adventure Game Interpreter, the early Sierra games.
SPEAKER_4: And it was reverse-engineered a long time ago, and there used to be a very big community of fan-made games.
SPEAKER_4: I think over 200 are supported by SrummVM.
SPEAKER_4: And one of them is called AGI Tetris.
SPEAKER_4: So you can just play Tetris.
SPEAKER_4: Why it is AGI?
SPEAKER_4: Because they stole the backgrounds, backdrops from different games like King's Quest and just shamelessly use it.
SPEAKER_4: And then another game authoring engine, Wintermute, they also have Tetris implementation in them.
SPEAKER_4: So it's not about that.
SPEAKER_4: And this is, by the way, how RPGs entered the project.
SPEAKER_4: Because Legend of Kirandia engine, it uses also on the same engine, Lens of Lore is built, which is RPG.
SPEAKER_4: And this is like why it was there.
SPEAKER_4: Then we later added Eye of Beholder, Eye of Beholder 1, Eye of Beholder, the pure RPGs.
SPEAKER_4: It's in the same Legend of Kirandia engine.
SPEAKER_4: And so the door were open.
SPEAKER_4: We said, okay, we have already supported these five different RPGs, let's add more.
SPEAKER_4: And this is why we added Mind and Magic, and we added Ultima engines.
SPEAKER_2: Wow.
SPEAKER_2: Yeah, that's a lot of stuff.
SPEAKER_2: What are you going to say, Jurg?
SPEAKER_3: Yeah, I just wanted to say, just by adding so much stuff and having so many developers, I mean, you mentioned it as a positive thing, that you have a growing number of developers.
SPEAKER_3: But isn't that also negative in a way that you have to coordinate so many people at once and to make sure that the quality of the product, in your case, ScummVM still upholds to your quality standards?
SPEAKER_4: First of all, there are very limited amount of people who are working on core, which is the framework.
SPEAKER_4: For instance, all the changes have to go through my approval, through my review, and there are several other people which are helping with this.
SPEAKER_4: But then when we have many developers, but they are compartmentalized, so they're working inside of their engine.
SPEAKER_4: So they are not touching any other code.
SPEAKER_4: So as I mentioned, 108 different projects inside of ScummVM.
SPEAKER_4: Right now, by the way, right now, as I speak, I'm slowly working on a subsystem which we grew dramatically, and executable is like half of a gigabyte on Windows because it includes everything.
SPEAKER_4: And we wanted to work on a smaller platform.
SPEAKER_4: So I finally started implementing it, and it is close to completion.
SPEAKER_4: The way of turning off, removing from the ScummVM project, unused pieces of code which are referenced there.
SPEAKER_4: So then if let's say you want to release a game commercially, or you want to put your game on a smaller device, which doesn't support like maybe 30 of 100 engines because they're too big resolution, or maybe too heavy, then you turn them off, and if they use in some specific libraries or algorithm, for instance, video codecs, then they will be not even compiled in, so your executable will be smaller.
SPEAKER_4: So when people are working, we have people are specialized, for instance, on specific port, and they're working only on the back end, port like for Amiga.
SPEAKER_4: So Amiga guy touches only his sub-directory within the project, where his port-specific, platform-specific files and logics is code is living.
SPEAKER_4: And then there is another gentleman who is working these days on Darkseed engine, he wants to release it finally.
SPEAKER_4: So he's working only on this engine.
SPEAKER_4: He's not touching other engines.
SPEAKER_4: And this is like why, unfortunately, when some people live in the project in the years, it happens.
SPEAKER_4: Some of the engines, they kind of get installed.
SPEAKER_4: We can't even do backfixing because they left and there's engine, they had knowledge.
SPEAKER_4: We cannot, it's too complex.
SPEAKER_3: So what's the plan to resolve that?
SPEAKER_3: Assigning new people, saying like learn, learn how the other stuff works?
SPEAKER_3: We are all merit-acquiring.
SPEAKER_4: Yes, we are all merit-acquiring.
SPEAKER_4: I cannot, the only place, or only time when I kind of put in a little pressure on developers is at the time of release, then we do a bug bash.
SPEAKER_4: So we select which bugs needs to be fixed before release, which are release blockers, and only that before that we are working.
SPEAKER_4: If you talk about the approach of the software development, maybe you heard it's called Train Model.
SPEAKER_4: So train goes by specific schedule.
SPEAKER_4: And if you complete the feature, then it goes into release.
SPEAKER_4: If you didn't complete it, it goes into next one.
SPEAKER_4: So what is happening when the engine is approaching maturity, and then we announce so-called public testing.
SPEAKER_4: So then we remove that scary warning for you that, hey, it's beta version.
SPEAKER_4: Please test.
SPEAKER_4: And then after we have positive feedback from the people that they play through the game, and it is working properly, then we announce it as compatible.
SPEAKER_4: And that means that we start accepting the bug reports about it from the external community.
SPEAKER_4: Before that, we have maybe like out of 108, maybe around 20 engines are still in the in heavy development in 3, like Last Express is one of those, which are not yet ready for the public, but you can run ScummVM 90, and maybe you can even complete the game end to end.
SPEAKER_4: Just we are not happy because there may be some bugs, some visual glitches, or some features maybe just skipping not existing in the engine.
SPEAKER_3: So that means once I complete my German Pundit League adventure that isn't beta state, I should report back if I finish the game without bugs or something?
SPEAKER_4: Yes, absolutely.
SPEAKER_4: That would be a really great thing.
SPEAKER_4: We unfortunately had several games which have so low number of testers that we still market them as incompatibility or untested.
SPEAKER_4: People are lazy of reporting back.
SPEAKER_4: I don't know what is happening.
SPEAKER_4: They expect everything working and for free because the mobile devices spoil them.
SPEAKER_3: I mean, the main reason actually why I'm using Scumbium is because the original game requires you to have the CD-ROM in the drive all the time because of copy protection, and that really annoys me.
SPEAKER_3: So I can tuck the DVD away and just play the Scumbium without having to insert it all the time.
SPEAKER_3: As we know, as I mentioned at the beginning of the interview, a lot of copy protections stopped working since Windows 8 and up.
SPEAKER_3: So for example, secure ROM and all those things, they're not really working anymore.
SPEAKER_3: So even if you would want to play it legally, the only option is to get Scumbium in those cases.
SPEAKER_4: Correct.
SPEAKER_4: This is why Scumbium is used so much on foreign Steam and Goodall games in order to run those.
SPEAKER_4: Also, in some cases, there was not possible from looking at the game scripts, if the game protection was existing or not, because it was existing only in executable.
SPEAKER_4: So since we are not using the original executable with secure ROM, we have no idea that the original executable was encrypted as it was.
SPEAKER_4: We are working only with the data, so this is why you can get it unprotected for free.
SPEAKER_3: Right.
SPEAKER_3: Without using some weird no CD patch or whatever.
SPEAKER_3: That's a plus, yeah.
SPEAKER_3: Because it's always feeling a bit weird if one has to do that.
SPEAKER_3: Despite I paid for the game, I have a perfectly legal copy, but it still feels a bit weird to have to do that sometimes.
SPEAKER_3: It's like, damn.
SPEAKER_4: Yes.
SPEAKER_4: The modern state makes me cry, especially for those games which have online component.
SPEAKER_4: They shut down the server and goodbye.
SPEAKER_3: Yeah.
SPEAKER_3: That actually happened to me with Need for Speed Shift 1.
SPEAKER_3: I bought a legal serial key from Origin.
SPEAKER_3: Now they call it the EA app.
SPEAKER_3: But the game itself still has a copy protection, and connects to a registration server for the license key that you just bought online five minutes ago from the platform.
SPEAKER_3: But since it cannot reach the server, it cannot validate that your license key is actually valid.
SPEAKER_3: So it refuses to play the game.
SPEAKER_3: So you actually have to go into the Windows directory, Windows registry, and put in some code manually and stuff.
SPEAKER_3: And I'm like, oh my God.
SPEAKER_2: Hang on one sec, I got to open a door, but carry on.
SPEAKER_3: No problem.
SPEAKER_3: So I just wonder, for once, why is EA still selling those keys, knowing that they can't be activated?
SPEAKER_3: And for a second, why not?
SPEAKER_3: I don't know.
SPEAKER_3: Implementing a fix, you know?
SPEAKER_3: It's just weird for me sometimes.
SPEAKER_4: It is not so weird for me, because imagine how it does.
SPEAKER_4: So people who are managing the web shop are one people, and then there is a request, hey, could you please release this?
SPEAKER_4: And they say, hey, we need to ask legal.
SPEAKER_4: Legal without not being technical, say no.
SPEAKER_4: And they say, no, we cannot do it.
SPEAKER_4: And this is how you end up with all of this nonsense in it.
SPEAKER_4: And this is like why it is sometimes so sad to see, like there are mixed understanding for certain releases, especially by certain companies, which are even kind of proud about it.
SPEAKER_4: But what we see is that it looks to me, and not just to me, often as a way of getting a quick buck, rather expressing the love for the game.
SPEAKER_4: So this is like why they could use cheap AI for upscaling and announcing it as a remaster or releasing broken versions or unreadable disks.
SPEAKER_4: Just because they don't care.
SPEAKER_4: They care about getting money.
SPEAKER_4: Hey, we paid for this license.
SPEAKER_4: Let us just push it to the market as soon as possible.
SPEAKER_4: And this is how you end up with all the things.
SPEAKER_4: And this is like why projects like us, we kind of have a pretty high standards for the things.
SPEAKER_4: So when we announce something as supported, it should be pretty nice and pretty well.
SPEAKER_4: So this is like why I cared much about that library lightning for in Broken Sword 2.5 for the commercial release.
SPEAKER_4: Same with her, but you can still complete the game.
SPEAKER_4: So like swallow it.
SPEAKER_3: Yeah, I was really surprised about that one.
SPEAKER_3: For once that you, it was even you who wrote like, it would be nice to have the game fully fixed for the next release of ScummVM.
SPEAKER_3: And I was like, wow, now I really put the pressure on the project.
SPEAKER_3: Because I was writing in the forum that in a few days, we are going to interview Marius Gosh, who was one of the project leaders of the game.
SPEAKER_3: And I was like, oh my God, I didn't want to cause so much trouble to ScummVM, but it's nice.
SPEAKER_3: Did you actually fix or find out about the defacing bug in the save screen?
SPEAKER_4: Not yet.
SPEAKER_4: I didn't manage it for the release.
SPEAKER_4: Why so?
SPEAKER_4: Because I put it, I stopped it halfway.
SPEAKER_4: Why so?
SPEAKER_4: When we were working on this engine originally, yes, I remember 12 years ago, we didn't see how the debugging, so we saw that there was a certain pieces of engine which were for the debug purposes, but we didn't find it referenced from anywhere.
SPEAKER_4: And now we take a look and I found it, and I enabled debugger and it immediately crashed for me because those pieces were removed.
SPEAKER_4: And I re-edit those, but still it is not working.
SPEAKER_4: So there is some problem with priority, because the original engine was OpenGL based.
SPEAKER_4: So what does it do?
SPEAKER_4: It always renders everything just in zet order.
SPEAKER_4: And apparently in that particular room, zet order is too high.
SPEAKER_4: So it is not defaced.
SPEAKER_4: But if you take a look more closely, when you move the mouse, it tries to restore background and it restores the ground from a different picture.
SPEAKER_4: So this is like when you can paint with your mouse.
SPEAKER_4: So that's the reason.
SPEAKER_4: And this is so far as I reached out, because it happens only in those rooms.
SPEAKER_4: In other rooms, it doesn't happen with the death screen.
SPEAKER_4: So not yet, sorry.
SPEAKER_4: In 2.9.0, ScummVM, this bug is still present, but it is not critical.
SPEAKER_4: But the bug which you find out with the lightning was quite embarrassing because I realized, I found out that we never implemented lightning so properly.
SPEAKER_4: And it was just not noticeable in other parts.
SPEAKER_4: We were always like how it is a light map, like a picture with all of different darker things.
SPEAKER_4: And when you move your character, it picks the color of the pixel and then adds a tint to the character.
SPEAKER_4: But we were taking, this was not working at all.
SPEAKER_4: We were always getting the tint from the coordinate 0, 0.
SPEAKER_4: And in library, it appeared to be dark.
SPEAKER_4: Everywhere it was white, so we didn't even notice that lighting is not working.
SPEAKER_4: But there for some reason, there is like maybe smudge of the mouse, and because it's not visible, it was dark and this is like why lighting, it was super dark everywhere.
SPEAKER_4: We didn't know this for 15 years.
SPEAKER_4: Nobody reported.
SPEAKER_3: Yeah, well, I mean he told me during the interview, I was the guy who was very thorough in my research.
SPEAKER_3: He was like, wow, you really played through the game and reported all the bugs and so on.
SPEAKER_3: Wow, you know.
SPEAKER_3: Yeah, I mean, I take big pride in researching before we interview people and giving it some effort, you know.
SPEAKER_4: Or another thing which you reported, that in airport, the background noise stops.
SPEAKER_4: And you know why nobody noticed?
SPEAKER_4: Because I didn't know what you were doing there, but people normally go pretty fast in this section.
SPEAKER_4: And the background music is about three minutes long, and then it's supposed to loop.
SPEAKER_4: And loop was not working, but nobody reported it because maybe nobody was playing so long for this particular game.
SPEAKER_3: Yeah.
SPEAKER_3: The reason why I reported is because for the Mario Skosh interview, I was looking at live streams, and in those live streams where people were doing long plays, they are talking to the chat and so on.
SPEAKER_3: So it delays everything a bit.
SPEAKER_3: And they were never using the SrummVM version, but only using the original version from the home page.
SPEAKER_3: So I knew, okay, there's a difference between SrummVM and the version from the home page, because their game was totally different than my experience with SrummVM, because my take was like, I'm not going through the hassle of trying to get it to run in Windows 11.
SPEAKER_3: I'm just using the easy way.
SPEAKER_3: And then this way I found out about all those bugs, because I was comparing my gameplay with others from the live streams that they put up on YouTube.
SPEAKER_3: But the thing is, I noticed later, that's not even only happening in the airport, but also in the underground and other places.
SPEAKER_4: It's everywhere.
SPEAKER_4: It's a general bug.
SPEAKER_3: Oh, it's a general bug even?
SPEAKER_3: Okay.
SPEAKER_4: Yes.
SPEAKER_4: No looping music were looping ever.
SPEAKER_3: Wow.
SPEAKER_4: Nobody noticed.
SPEAKER_4: By the way, speaking of that, I just wanted to mention that we also support very much the community of speedrunners.
SPEAKER_4: And they massively use SrummVM.
SPEAKER_4: And I was adding recently additional features specifically for them.
SPEAKER_4: Like for instance, how to lock the random number generator.
SPEAKER_4: So you can put initial seed in your configuration file, and then you have 100 percent replayability, and all that's different things.
SPEAKER_4: So if anyone has any troubles for the speed running, we will gladly fix those.
SPEAKER_4: Or keep an unfixed, if it is being exploited for this.
SPEAKER_3: Interesting that you mentioned it, because I was actually looking, I was watching some videos today and the days before about the Space Quest historian, and he mentioned that you fixed some Space Quest 4 CD version bugs about the timing of the era games that made the games running timing-wise too fast for some events, so you couldn't complete the game in modern computers.
SPEAKER_3: So that's, though you are mentioned always in context with the era games and those timing events and the speedrun community.
SPEAKER_3: There's, they always mention like, yeah, SrummVM fixed this thing, you know.
SPEAKER_3: So, it's quite, quite interesting, yeah.
SPEAKER_4: The era games were very, very problematic.
SPEAKER_4: What they were doing, they were releasing hundreds of games, and their quality control was much worse than of the LucasArts, because they were rivals at the moment, at that moment.
SPEAKER_4: But what they were doing, they were doing the patches and sending you floppies to the people.
SPEAKER_4: So, as a result, there are sometimes dozens of different versions of the same game, but slightly different with all the different bug fixes.
SPEAKER_4: So, what we did, we implemented a whole subsystem of patching the original scripts, and we wrote a sophisticated debugger and memory leak checker also, and address sanitizer right inside for this Sierra Creative Interpretive Scripts.
SPEAKER_4: As a result, we had almost a thousand of different game patches.
SPEAKER_4: We had a dedicated person, Slaus Box, who has a really, what is his last name is Ben Hoff, forgot his first name, and he is so passionate about this, and he collects all of those original Sierra bugs and fixes them, goes into like rabbit hole of understanding why, how, and making it absolutely working.
SPEAKER_4: Even like if you take any version of Sierra game, we implement all of those fixes which were in the later releases.
SPEAKER_3: So when I have a version of the earlier versions, let's say King's Quest, for example.
SPEAKER_3: I actually learned that in between the different version releases, they even change some graphics, though in the later versions, they only need one disk less than before.
SPEAKER_3: So that means I always get the experience of the game as intended by the version I own as a copy or not, or will SrummVM patch in the bugs regardless?
SPEAKER_4: Okay.
SPEAKER_4: So we're talking about slightly different things.
SPEAKER_4: I'm talking about script bugs.
SPEAKER_4: So if there are script bugs and later fixed, we incorporate those.
SPEAKER_4: But what you're talking about, I know what you're talking about, what they did, the Sierra pictures, they are not bitmaps, they are vector graphics.
SPEAKER_4: So what they were doing, their artists were just drawing, and then this line here, line here, line here.
SPEAKER_4: So as a result, what they were doing for some, after a certain point, they simplified those pictures.
SPEAKER_4: So they take less space.
SPEAKER_4: Of course, we are not replacing those pictures.
SPEAKER_4: But if there is some game-breaking bugs and there were plenty in Sierra, not dead ends intended, but game-breaking bugs, we fixed those.
SPEAKER_3: Ah, interesting.
SPEAKER_2: Yeah.
SPEAKER_3: It's amazing how much time you can spend discussing those things.
SPEAKER_3: I mean, we are talking about game engines for over an hour now.
SPEAKER_3: It's such an amazing topic.
SPEAKER_2: Wow.
SPEAKER_3: But I always wondered, how do you go about the different platforms of the games?
SPEAKER_3: I mean, you have basically all versions of all platforms of all games.
SPEAKER_3: Is that kind of your goal?
SPEAKER_3: I mean, for example, Sack McCracken was also released on Japanese PCs and different platforms.
SPEAKER_3: And I don't know, how do you go about that?
SPEAKER_3: Is it when you add support for a game that you are going after any platform the game was ever released on?
SPEAKER_4: So first of all, for the documentation purposes, we indeed try to chase every possible version, just to have it registered in our detection system.
SPEAKER_4: But then it depends if there are...
SPEAKER_4: Very often, there are very little or no difference in data formats.
SPEAKER_4: So then the difference would be just in the defile content, which is we check by the check sum, in order to ensure that it is.
SPEAKER_4: But also very often, it is related to the specific of a platform like Soundchip.
SPEAKER_4: If it is Commodore 64, then the music will be for the SID chip, and we have SID chip emulator.
SPEAKER_4: So if it is a known format, that's a no-brainer of Ariendez or like Omega version, we have support for several different mode formats.
SPEAKER_4: If it is so, if the music in the slightly different format, and we have already like processor for that format, then it is piece of cake of adding this.
SPEAKER_4: But sometimes the differences are more, much deeper, and then it depends if we have skills and desire to go into rabbit hole and implement it.
SPEAKER_4: To give a great example, Flight on the Amazon Queen is a game, there is an Amiga release, but we didn't never add it Amiga release because it is less superior than those versions, so it will not add anything new.
SPEAKER_4: The game is freeware, here it is going to play it, but it will require significant reworking of the graphics because they have a different thing inside of it, different form, a different compression, and it is written in the MS68 assembly, so fewer and fewer people do speak it.
SPEAKER_4: So this is like why and this is how.
SPEAKER_4: Sometimes it is possible to add additional platform, sometimes it is more difficult, and we do have expertise and we do add it.
SPEAKER_4: But sometimes we just register it, that okay, it exists.
SPEAKER_4: Maybe someday somebody comes.
SPEAKER_4: We have this gentleman who comes and goes through the years, comes out of blue, but he is so passionate about sound, so he comes and he freeride some of the sound generation routines, make it better, make it closer to the original.
SPEAKER_4: I never know when he comes next time, but when he comes, he comes, okay, here it is, that bunch of code, put it into SrummVM and it becomes instantly better.
SPEAKER_3: Awesome.
SPEAKER_3: Thanks a lot.
SPEAKER_4: I'm trying to work on a book.
SPEAKER_2: Oh, nice.
SPEAKER_2: Maybe.
SPEAKER_3: You should.
SPEAKER_3: You have so much knowledge, your head must explode.
SPEAKER_2: I mean, then when it's ready to be released, you can come back on and talk about that too.
SPEAKER_4: Okay.
SPEAKER_2: Yeah.
SPEAKER_3: So, yeah, it's, nothing, nothing.
SPEAKER_2: Oh, okay.
SPEAKER_2: So where can people go to find out more about SrummVM and what you guys are doing?
SPEAKER_4: srummvm.org.
SPEAKER_4: That's the primary website.
SPEAKER_4: Also wiki.srummvm.org, which is also linked from the website.
SPEAKER_4: And if you would like to talk to the developers, we have ready vibrant community on Discord.
SPEAKER_4: Once again, from srummvm.org, the link are directly over there.
SPEAKER_4: And then you just talk, ask your question.
SPEAKER_4: We have several, like maybe like 50 different channels and different topics there for different engines, for different peculiarities, even off topic channel.
SPEAKER_4: So, and like right now, how many?
SPEAKER_4: Let me check briefly.
SPEAKER_4: If I see, now where it is, okay.
SPEAKER_4: So, at this very moment, like we have three and a half thousand people on the server registered, and nine developers are online, me included.
SPEAKER_1: All right.
SPEAKER_2: Wow.
SPEAKER_2: We'll put links to everything in the description down below.
SPEAKER_3: I mean, not only that, you're also on any social media people can think of.
SPEAKER_3: I mean, you're on Mastodon, you're on X, you're any place.
SPEAKER_3: I mean, wow.
SPEAKER_4: On Facebook and recently, we even registered on Sky, Blue Sky.
SPEAKER_4: Okay.
SPEAKER_2: That's a good one.
SPEAKER_2: I like Blue Sky.
SPEAKER_3: You are everywhere.
SPEAKER_3: So it's amazing.
SPEAKER_3: You are unstoppable basically, right?
SPEAKER_3: It's amazing.
SPEAKER_1: Yeah.
SPEAKER_3: Well, awesome.
SPEAKER_3: Awesome.
SPEAKER_3: Perhaps one question before we stop.
SPEAKER_2: Yeah.
SPEAKER_3: Awesome.
SPEAKER_3: Yeah.
SPEAKER_3: Well, thanks for taking the time and sitting with us.
SPEAKER_3: Amazing.
SPEAKER_3: I mean, this totally, I learned such a lot today.
SPEAKER_3: I mean, I'm sure H8 also learned a lot.
SPEAKER_2: Yeah.
SPEAKER_2: Absolutely.
SPEAKER_3: It's amazing.
SPEAKER_3: The nuances and how finicky everything is.
SPEAKER_3: I mean, I'm pretty sure a lot of people would say, I'm done.
SPEAKER_3: It's too much work.
SPEAKER_3: But you guys keep going and it's amazing.
SPEAKER_3: I also like the attention of detail.
SPEAKER_3: As I just said, now you're going for safe screens and low screens.
SPEAKER_3: It's amazing.
SPEAKER_4: Nice talking to you guys.
SPEAKER_4: Good questions.
SPEAKER_4: I like it.
SPEAKER_3: Well, we do our best.
SPEAKER_3: I'm looking forward to see a fully bug-free Procon support 2.5.
SPEAKER_4: I will keep you informed when I fix it.
SPEAKER_3: I mean, you got all my safe games, so this is all I could supply basically.
SPEAKER_3: All righty.
SPEAKER_3: Nice.
SPEAKER_3: Have a good night.
SPEAKER_3: Awesome.
SPEAKER_1: Okay.
SPEAKER_1: Have a good evening.
SPEAKER_1: You too.
SPEAKER_1: Bye.